Litmus
November is one of the busiest months when it comes to the inbox. With lots of retailers sending lots of emails about their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, you can easily get bogged down by the noise! This is why it’s important for marketers to pull out all the stops to ensure that their emails cut through the noise. Here are the emails that stood out to us during this busy month: Hunter &pizza ILIA Porter Road Converse Kate Spade Lumens Hunter Subject Line: Personalization is here! Here at Litmus, we love all things personalized, so this email caught our attention from the subject line alone. This email allowed customers to add personalization to their Hunter boots. Each email was personalized to the recipient using CRM data and displayed their name on the header image of the boots. We loved this element of simple, yet very effective personalization. &pizza
When it comes to working smarter, certain tools are like the holy grail—and once you find them, you’re never going to let them go. From tools that help automate meetings, to ones that help create design elements and even animated GIF apps, there are so many to not only make you work more efficiently, but also with a smile on your face! We asked the Litmus team to share their favorite tools, which are essential to helping them work smarter. Here is what they said: CloudApp Meeter Followup Grafana Giphy Slack MyMind Figma Charlie Cook, Senior QA Engineer CloudApp What is CloudApp? CloudApp is an all-in-one screen recording software to capture and embed HD video, screen recordings, GIFs, screencasts, screenshots, and marked up images throughout business workflows. Why is this tool your favorite? I’m sure there are lots of tools out there that do something similar and I can’t say
In-person or virtual events revolve around getting to know other people and learning from one another. Because email is such a personal channel, it’s the ideal medium to build excitement for events and send reminders. To ensure that guests actually show up, it can be useful to include an “Add to Calendar” link in your event emails. With that, subscribers can add the events to their own calendars, making it easier to avoid calendar conflicts and allowing them to set up their own reminders. Traditionally, this is done with an ICS file—also known as iCalendar. This is a common calendar format that typically uses the .ics file extension and is widely accepted by most calendars. Not to be confused with Apple’s iCal, which shares a similar name, although iCalendar files do work there as well. For clarity, we’ll refer to this as an ICS or calendar file throughout this blog
An issue with using dynamic content on Apple clients is that Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) caches images—and only displays the cached image. This is a big problem, as dynamic content is usually time sensitive. Therefore when Apple caches images when an email is sent, by the time the recipient has opened the email, the content is no longer relevant. We ran into this problem for recent email campaign—and Carin Slater (our Email Marketing Specialist) found a workaround. She figured out a different way to swap the image out, so the content wouldn’t be irrelevant for subscribers opening on Apple clients. Read on to find out how we did this for an email sent to promote Litmus Live 2022. At Litmus Live 2021, Jay Oram spoke about using an external CSS to change an image in an email by having the image be a background image, then updating the external CSS
Are you’re trying to figure out how to do more email marketing with fewer staff and resources, less of a budget–and higher expectations for performance? Perhaps you just want to see more results from the time you commit to your email marketing campaigns. That’s the reality for many email marketers this year, and one we’ll likely see continue. While it’s encouraging that 37% of email teams increased their budgets in 2022, 61% stuck with the same amount of spend this year. Meanwhile, 70% of brands have increased email marketing workloads. Enter, the key to doing more with less: email automation. Email automation comes in all shapes and sizes, but no matter the strategy, it results in time saved and results lifted. In fact, 59% of respondents to our State of Email survey say expanding how they use email automation is a top priority. Let’s take a closer look at what
We learned so many new insights and interesting perspectives on pressing email marketing topics from Litmus Live 2022 (and we hope you did, too!) In the spirit of keeping the flow of knowledge-sharing alive, we asked our Litmus Live presenters to share what they predict is in store for email marketing in 2023 and beyond. Want to learn more predictions—from both the Litmus team and the email community? Make sure to register for our December Litmus Talks webinar where we’ll be discussing ALL the things we at Litmus think will be top of mind in email throughout 2023. 1. Data privacy will demand that social media and email cross-pollinate “Many marketers are relying on social media to grow an audience that they do not own. When you acquire an email address and other data, you own the records and it is portable. By collecting first-party data, marketers will be able
We’re back—this time with our three-month update on email client popularity! We analyzed nearly five billion email opens around the world with Litmus Email Analytics from August to October 2022. Let’s take a look at the shifts that took place since our last update. Before diving in, there are two things we always like to note: As of fall 2021, the category “Apple” includes Apple iPhone (iOS Mail), Apple Mail (macOS Mail), Apple iPad (iPadOS Mail), and Apple Mail Privacy Protection (Apple privacy-impacted opens). Learn why in this blog post. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) hides device data so we aren’t able to differentiate between iOS, iPadOS, or macOS. Additionally, the new OSes don’t differentiate between MPP and non-MPP in the user agent data it passes. Top 10 most popular email clients Over the three month period, the most popular email clients were Apple, Gmail, and Outlook—no surprise here. As
Trends in Email Engagement [Infographic] How much of an impact has Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) had on email marketing since its September 2021 release? How many subscribers now use Dark Mode? When’s the best time to send an email campaign based on your unique audience? We dug into Litmus Email Analytics data to see how key email engagement trends like these shifted from the end of August 2021 through the end of August 2022—and how they’ve stayed the same. Read on for a preview of what’s happening in email engagement. Download our full Trends in Email Enagement report to see even more in depth data, and details. In 2021, we recorded: 13.1 billion opens 1.01 billion/month (avg) End of August 2022, we recorded: 12.1 billion opens 1.5 billion/month (avg trending) How the top 3 email clients have shifted (by percent of opens) End of Aug 2022 Apple Mail Privacy:
Email clients (like Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook), operating systems and devices change frequently. Because there are more than 300,000 different rendering possibilities, email testing is really the only way to verify how your email will look when it arrives in your subscriber’s inbox. But sorting through preview after preview is time-consuming. When’s the last time you took a minute to assess how thorough and efficient your testing processes really are? We compiled this list of seven email testing best practices from our team of Litmus email experts to help you find new ways to test smarter and get flawless emails out the door faster. 1. Know which email clients matter for your audience Our Litmus customer support team is often asked about the most popular email clients, and you can find that information updated each month on our email client market share page. While knowing the most popular email clients
This piece originally appeared in Venture Beat Marketers know customers don’t just crave personalized content—they expect it in the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) brands with which they interact. In fact: 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that personalizes experiences. Organizations using advanced personalization generate 17% more revenue through their campaigns. 71% of consumers feel frustrated with impersonal experiences. When trying to execute highly personalized email marketing campaigns, however, marketers encounter many barriers. More than 40% of marketers cite a lack of resources—time, people, and money—and the right tools as a significant challenge. Additionally, more than 90% of marketers identify marketing as critical to their company’s overall success. In 2022, over 40% of companies plan to increase their investment in email marketing. Dynamic content automation is finding its moment to shine. Dynamic content automation combines data, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to create