Surprising. Entertaining. Informative. GIFs are all of these things, and marketers and customers alike love these fun email additions. But you know what else GIFs can be? Big. It’s easy for a GIF file size to grow to bloated, behemoth proportions that interfere with email load times. 

So what’s an email marketer to do? Evan Diaz, the Lead Designer at Lucky Red Pixel, has the answers. Here’s what we learned from his Litmus Live presentation, “Creating Animations That Delight and Help Subscribers.” 

Tiny but mighty: Why keeping GIF file sizes low is so crucial

Large GIFs lead to slow email loading or downloads that eat up a subscriber’s phone data plan. Both of these can leave subscribers frustrated, which jeopardizes all your hard work and impacts your campaigns’ performance. That’s why keeping GIF file sizes small is one of the key challenges email marketers have to master if they want to use the power of animated GIFs in their email campaigns. 

How big can a GIF in email be?

In general, the smaller your GIF is the faster it loads in your emails—and the shorter your load times, the better the experience is for your subscribers. But what’s the maximum file size that’s acceptable for a GIF? Evan advises keeping files under 5 MB. At 5 MB, a subscriber will probably only have to wait a few seconds for images to load. Here at Litmus, we’re trying to keep GIFs under 1 MB to guarantee speedy load times and to not eat up too much of our readers’ data should they open our email on mobile while on the go. 

Focus on file size optimization throughout the GIF creation process

Reducing GIF file size starts on the drawing board. Once you have an idea for your GIF, there are some design choices you can make to keep sizes in check. Plus, when it comes to finetuning your GIF in Photoshop and processing it for use in email, there are additional tricks you can utilize to stop your GIFs from becoming too heavy. Here’s the top ten tips for keeping GIF sizes small:

1. Stick to simpler (AKA faster) transitions

If your animation involves transitions, stick to “cuts” over “fades.” Whereas cuts jump right from one visual to the next, fades take their time to deliver the same message. Fades involve more frames, more colors, and thus come with larger file sizes. The example below shows how significant the impact of a fade transition is on file size. If you choose a fade effect over a simple cut transition, your GIF file is 7.8 times larger. 

Not a fan of cut transitions? Evan suggests using a “translate” transition, where one frame slides over the previous image. This way, you get interesting movement without bogging down the file with more color transitions from a fade. 

2. Use illustrations over photos when possible

In the same way that processing more colors in a fade transition increases GIF file size, so too do the complex colors in photographs. Illustrations will have more solid-color components than a photo or video, which typically makes them less heavy. 

Another benefit of simply-colored illustrations is that you can incorporate more movement and animation with a smaller file size footprint. Subtle changes in a photograph are more cumbersome to load than multiple animated frames for an illustration that tells a story. If there’s no way around using a photograph, then you should isolate the animated portion. Instead of the entire image being a GIF, you can significantly decrease the file size by leaving all non-moving sections as images. 

3. Overlay colors to limit the color palette in photographs

Another way to bring down the file size when you need to use a photo or video is to overlay a single color on the GIF. A monochrome overlay gives the GIF an on-brand tint and limits the number of different colors the GIF needs to process. The result: smaller file sizes!

4. When turning a video into a GIF, import every other frame to a layer

Photoshop will convert your video frames to layers when you select File > Import > Video Frames to Layers. This is a handy tool, but it can lead to a runaway GIF file size if you aren’t careful.

Optimize your file size by limiting layers to every 2 frames. This option will take every other frame to create layers, which reduces file size. If taking the layers down to every other frame isn’t enough, Evan noted that having Photoshop only pick up one out of every 4 frames is still a good place to start.

5. Delete duplicate frames

After importing your GIF to Photoshop, you can look at the animation frame-by-frame. If there are multiple layers with the same frame image, give the duplicates the boot. You’ll need to change the frame delay to keep GIF timing the same, but tidying up your GIF in this way can save 10%-30% off your file size. Simply “hold” the single frame for the number of seconds equivalent to the number of duplicate frames you’ve deleted to keep the GIF on pace.

Here at Litmus, we often use EZGIF to optimize our animated GIFs. The free online GIF optimizer gives you the option to easily delete duplicate frames if you don’t have access to Photoshop or a similar tool.

6. Adjust delay to match animation complexity

There’s a simple inverse relationship in GIFs: the higher the frames per second, the less jerkiness in playback. A delay of .03 will likely be the default Photoshop gives your uploaded GIF, which creates a 30 FPS animation that loads very smoothly. But the more frames you need to load per second, the larger your file size will be. You’ll want to find the sweet spot that keeps your animation smooth enough while keeping your file size low. 

A delay of .03 is a great place to be, that is, unless you have a complex video or animation. Bumping the delay out to .05 or .10 is still an acceptable balance of smaller file sizes and loading that’s just a bit jerky. If you have a complex video, though, these FPS rates lead to big file sizes. Evan suggests a delay of .20 for keeping the file size down on very complex videos. 

7. Choose adaptive color reduction

When you save your GIF for the web, you’ll be met with a few options for color reduction. Evan’s best practice suggestion is “adaptive” color reduction. This algorithm samples colors that appear most in an image and provides a fair balance between file size and color fidelity.

8. Keep “transparency” turned on

Animated GIFs don’t offer support for transparency. If you’d like to use animations on a transparent background, animated PNGs are the way to go. So what does that “transparency” checkbox in Photoshop actually do? It allows pixels that didn’t change from frame to frame to remain as they are. That means that areas on the GIF that remain constant from one frame to the next don’t need to bother reloading. Evan suggests leaving this turned on most of the time, as it can reduce your file size by a third or more. 

9. Balance the color table with dither

During export, you also have the option to adjust the number of colors saved to the image file’s color table. The lower the number of colors, the smaller the file size. To get the best combination of optimized file size to color fidelity, choose:

• 128-256 colors for videos
• 64-128 colors for animated illustrations

If you want to really fine-tune your file size, you can combine your color table changes with the dither percentage. A higher dither percentage leads to smoother gradients, even with a limited color table. For example, a greyscale with only 8 color stripes becomes a smooth gradient with 100% dither turned on. A higher dither combined with a color table on the lower end for videos just might be the sweet spot for a GIF that looks nice yet loads quickly.

10. Simply reduce video quality and file size with Lossy

Want to optimize your GIF file size without all the fine tweaking involved in color tables and dither? Selecting a Lossy level of 20% to 40% reduces file size, and some quality, in one fell swoop. You can play around with these percentages to find the balance of quality and file size that’s right for you.

Watch Evan’s full Litmus Live talk

Are you looking for even more tips on how to create animations that delight and help subscribers? You can watch Evan’s full Litmus Live talk below!

What’s your secret to optimizing animated GIFs for email?

Great GIFs can add context and fun to an email, while a GIF gone bad can distract from the message or cause subscribers to avoid your emails altogether. What are your tricks to optimizing animated GIFs for email? We’d love to hear them in the comments below!   

The post Animated GIFs in Email: 10 Tips for Keeping Files Sizes Small appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Email marketers are always trying to improve their campaigns—through the use of copy, design, and images. They are always on the lookout for something to set them apart from the rest of the inbox and draw attention to their emails—enticing readers to click through and care about their message.

Many marketers are finding that adding animation is just the thing to increase subscriber engagement, and are increasingly turning to animated GIFs in email to provide that bit of extra interest. In 2018, 56.6% of email marketers said that they’re using animated GIFs at least sometimes in their marketing emails.

What is a GIF?

The GIF, which stands for Graphics Interchange Format, is an image format developed by CompuServe in 1987. Due to wide support across browsers and email clients, GIFs have been a popular image format since the early days of the internet.

More importantly, though, GIFs can be animated. Similar to how a flipbook works, GIFs rapidly display a series of images to produce the illusion of motion. In the internet’s early years, GIFs (and the marquee and blink tags) were the primary method of adding movement to a web page.

A lot has changed since the 90s. Animated GIFs are enjoying a renaissance both on the web and in email marketing. While there is still some debate as to how you actually pronounce “GIF”, most will agree that GIFs can be an excellent marketing tool. Whether you prefer a hard “G” or like to rhyme GIF with a certain brand of peanut butter, let’s look at why GIFs are so useful in email campaigns.

Why Use a GIF?

Using an animated GIF adds an element of delight to a campaign that isn’t typically possible with static email designs. A number of campaigns use animated GIFs for humor, and do so with great success.

Women’s clothing shop Ann Taylor LOFT used an animated present to create a sense of intrigue and get subscribers to click through to “unwrap” their gift.

Often, this bit of movement is enough to surprise a reader, trigger their interest, and get them to click through to a landing page. We used this trick in this email to promote our 2018 Email Client Market Share infographic. You can check out the full email and its code here.

But animated GIFs can be used for more than just gimmicks and humor. Email service provider Mailchimp used animated GIFs in a series of emails to help explain its redesigned interface.

Instead of relying on lengthy blocks of copy to explain the new interface, animated GIFs showed how the application works, effectively acting as a miniature “explainer” video, and leaving no room for confusion amongst customers. Naturally, many were pleased with the campaigns:

Sprout Social also used a GIF to show off the interactions of their redesigned iPhone app.

Even if you don’t provide full tutorials in GIF form, animated GIFs can be used to illustrate complex concepts in an easily digestible manner. This email from Code School is a beautiful example of illustrating a complex idea—all the things you can do with Google Drive.

Drawbacks of Using a GIF

As great as animated GIFs are, there are a few drawbacks with including them in email campaigns.

Support

First, not every email client supports animated GIFs. Outlook 2007, 2010 and 2013 won’t show the animation. Instead, they will show the first frame. To overcome this, many email designers ensure that vital information—perhaps a call-to-action, offer, or headline—is included in the first frame of the GIF.

Overuse

Second, if used too aggressively, it’s likely that many subscribers will become complacent with your GIFs and stop paying attention to them. Used sparingly, animated GIFs can surprise and delight subscribers. Used too frequently, the same subscribers may tire of them and become less likely to engage with your campaigns.

Accessibility

Third, animated GIFs can pose a problem in terms of accessibility for a variety of reasons. Content flashing rates between 2 Hz and 55 Hz can harm users with photosensitive epilepsy. In addition, users who are visually impaired may have difficulty reading or reviewing content on a GIF before the animation changes. So ensure your animated GIFs either have smooth transitions or don’t animate from one frame to the next at a high rate.

And, since GIFs are image files, you should always include appropriate alternative text for users that rely on assistive technology like screen readers. Images are inherently inaccessible for a lot of users, so providing copy and context allows them to understand your message more clearly.

Finally, animated GIFs are prone to excessive file sizes. In an increasingly mobile world, file size can play an important part in any email program. Extremely large GIFs both cut into subscribers’ data plans and can be slow to load and play—both of which are frustrations that no audience should have to deal with. Fortunately, there are a number of methods for creating GIFs and reducing their file size.

Get Your Animated GIFs Loading Faster Read our post on reducing animated GIF file sizes and get expert tips on keeping your GIFs small and subscriber-friendly. Read the post →

Creating a GIF

While there are many tools available for creating GIFs, the go-to application for most designers is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop has a number of ways to create animated GIFs, including frame-by-frame animation, timeline animation, and importing video frames. More importantly, designers have the full power of Photoshop’s graphics tools at their disposal when crafting their next great GIF.

Dan Denney has an excellent tutorial on creating advanced animations with Photoshop, including an example PSD for download to see just how he accomplishes his animations.

Not everyone has Photoshop chops, though. Many marketers and designers need to make GIFs out of existing video footage. While you could use something like Adobe After Effects, tools exist for most platforms that make GIF creation easy. On Mac, many people swear by GIF Brewery. Windows users can take advantage of programs like Instagiffer and GIF Animator. If you’re looking for online tools, there is no shortage of web-based GIF creators. There are even apps on mobile that can help you create GIFs!

Here are some more tutorials on creating GIFs to get you started:

• How to Create an Animated Email
• Build Animated GIFs in Photoshop
• How to Create an Animated GIF
• How to Create Your Own Animated GIFs the Easy Way

Saving a GIF

No matter how you create your GIF, the key to incorporating it into an email is keeping the file size to a minimum. While there are a few compression tools for decreasing the file size of GIFs, the best optimization happens when you can alter the file in a program like Photoshop.

Using Photoshop, you can dig into the individual frames of an animated GIF and prune them to keep your file sizes down. Some good ways to optimize GIFs include:

• Cropping. Keep your focus on what is animated, cropping the image as much as possible to reduce the file size.
• Removing frames. The human eye doesn’t need a lot to see motion. You’d be surprised by how many frames you can remove from a GIF while still maintaining the illusion of motion.
• Only animate part of the picture. Don’t force the entire image to redraw itself in every frame. Use layers in Photoshop to isolate animated parts and only animate those layers.

Designer Paul Boag has an excellent article on his blog about optimizing GIFs made with Cinemagram in Photoshop. Livejournal user skylilies has another great tutorial on optimizing GIFs in Photoshop.

When it comes to actually saving your GIFs, one of the best ways to reduce file size is to reduce the number of colors actually saved in the file.

Drastically reducing the number of colors used in the image can reduce the quality of the saved GIF, but finding a good balance between quality and file size is a great way to ensure your GIFs work well across devices.

Using GIFs in Email

Once you have your optimized GIF, you need to include it in your email. Fortunately, this is the easiest part of the process. Since GIFs are just another image file format, you can include an animated GIF the same way as any other image in your email.

<img src="http://yourwebsite.com/path/to/awesome.gif" width="100" height="100" alt="GIF with a hard G" border="0">

Email Client Support

While animated GIFs don’t work everywhere, support across most email clients is exceptional. Animated GIFs work in all webmail clients and most desktop and mobile clients. The main exceptions are Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, and 2013, which all refuse to animate the GIF and instead displays only the first frame of the animation.

Apart from that, you can see that animated GIFs work beautifully on all other clients.

Desktop Clients

Lotus Notes (6, 7, 8.5)

Outlook 2000-2003

Outlook 2007-2013

Outlook for Mac

Apple Mail

Windows 10 Mail

Webmail Clients

Gmail

G Suite

Yahoo! Mail

AOL

Outlook.com

Comcast

Orange.fr

SFR.fr

GMX.de

Web.de

T-Online.de

Freenet.de

Mail.ru

Mobile Clients

iOS Mail

Android (Default)

Android (Gmail)

Android (Gmail IMAP)

Blackberry

Animated GIF Alternatives

While animated GIFs are an email marketing mainstay, the limited support and potentially time-consuming nature of GIF creation could scare off some marketers. For those looking to add motion to their campaigns without animated GIFs, a few alternatives do exist.

The first is using animated PNG files, or APNGs, like we did in one of our own recent email campaigns. Animated PNGs work similar to GIFs with the added bonus of better support for transparency. While GIFs can be transparent, they typically introduce a white outline to graphics that can stand out on darker backgrounds. APNGs, on the other hand, work brilliantly with transparency and can be an ideal solution in certain situations. Unfortunately, APNGs have more limited support than animated GIFs, although that will likely change in the future.

Another alternative is using CSS animations in place of GIFs. Using simple CSS properties, you can animate a variety of HTML elements and images alike. While CSS animations can get unwieldy for more complex animations, for things like hover effect, slide-ins and fades, and simple movements in an email, they can be a lighter weight solution than GIFs. Plus, CSS animations fallback more gracefully than animated GIFs when support is lacking. For a more in-depth guide to CSS animations in email, check out our post on understanding the two key CSS properties for animation: transitions and keyframes.

Some of Our Favorites

Now that you have a good idea of how to use GIFs in a campaign, here are some of our favorite GIFs we’ve seen in campaigns recently. Click on any GIF to see the full emails.

General Assembly always has cool, custom GIFs. I stay subscribed mostly to see what they come up with next!

ThirdLove embraces all kinds of underwear.

Boys & Girls Clubs of America use GIFs to get clicks to a 2019 recap video about how they’re helping kids.

DPDK agency uses animated GIFs for calls-to-action to draw attention (and hopefully, clicks).

charity:water combines animated GIFs with cool, illustrated infographics for a beautiful campaign.

This email from Moo shows how you can use an animated GIF to give your imagery a sense of depth. And all under 130kb!

Photojojo showing off some new products:

Further Reading

• Animated GIF Support in Email from Campaign Monitor
• Using Animated GIFs in Email from ExactTarget
• Make GIFs Work in Email from The Next Web
• Email Animation Articles from STYLECampaign
• The Ultimate Guide to Using Animated GIFs in Your Marketing from Hubspot
• Animation in Email is Alive from Lyris
• PNG, GIF, or JPEG? Which is the Best Image Format for Email?

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The post A Guide to Animated GIFs in Email appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

After you’ve worked hard on your email campaigns, sent them to your subscribers, and analyzed the results… what’s next?

Email marketers, it’s time to look beyond the email channel on its own. The best email marketers don’t just send great campaigns and evaluate what’s working. They also communicate the power of the email channel across the marketing organization and beyond.

Use the power of email across marketing channels

Email marketing is your most measurable channel. You can measure overall campaign performance—like open, click-through, and conversion rates—but an email address as a unique identifier also lets you get a glimpse into each subscriber’s behavior and preferences. For each subscriber who interacts with your messages, you can learn what content resonates the most, how long they engage with your email, and whether or not your email leads to a conversion. You can learn about your subscribers on an individual level. No other channel provides that level of insight.

Plus, your subscribers have actively opted in to hearing from you; they’re looking to learn about your brand, your product, and your promotions. They’re the most closely aligned to your prospect audience and best able to show what they most want to hear about.

Email marketers have access to invaluable data with the power to inform and optimize marketing activities across the organization. But too often, those learnings don’t make it across the borders of the email team.

Poor integration keeps marketers from sharing learnings across channels

According to our research, 73% of marketers consider email important to their companies’ success, but a third of marketers don’t consider email to be integrated with the rest of their marketing program.

Tweet this chart →

The best email teams use email to empower the entire marketing organization

Great email marketers know how to use the power of the email channel to drive an incredible ROI of $42 to $1. But the best email marketers don’t just send perfect emails, monitor their performance, and use this data to improve the next campaign—they also break down silos, sharing insights about what’s working in email with their strategic leaders to help improve the effectiveness of other marketing channels.

Pre, Post, Perform Learn more about the three pillars of successful email marketing. Read the post →

You know how valuable email is, so why not take those hard-earned insights and apply them to your other marketing channels? Whether it’s strategic approach, content type, intended message, or visual design, the engagement insights you learn from email and your subscribers can inform what will best engage your audience—and help you be most effective in any channel.

A subject line triggered more opens than ever? Maybe similar language can drive results on paid. A post in your newsletter got more clicks than any other content piece? Your content team will love those insights to help shape future content.

How Litmus applies email learnings to inform other channels

For example, here at Litmus, we saw that this blog post generated incredible engagement in one of our newsletters. When our email team shared those results with the larger team and our VP of Marketing, it didn’t just inform our content strategy (there are more blog posts on email design trends, with more to come), but we also decided to promote this same topic via a paid media campaign.

The result: We more than doubled our average click-through rate, making this one of the most successful ads we’ve ever run.

Start sharing your email learnings with these tips

No matter your team’s size, everyone has room to grow when it comes to integrating email with other marketing channels—and making your email marketing learnings and performance data accessible throughout the marketing organization is the first step towards breaking down marketing silos.

Too often, teams that handle different channels are in competition with each other rather than focusing on how those channels can work together for the best overall results. Don’t fall into that trap. Share your learnings and collaborate across teams by implementing routines like these:

• Make email reporting dashboards accessible to everyone to make it easy for your team to see which campaigns resonated with your audience—and which didn’t.
• When reporting on email results, start a habit of writing up what campaign learnings might be interesting for other teams. Not sure where to start? Looking at the past year’s email performance can be a valuable exercise. This template can help.
• Set up monthly meetings with leaders across marketing channels so you can share key learnings from email—and to get insights from other channels that can inform future email campaigns.

The post Email Marketers, It’s Time to Break Out of Your Silos appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

We’ve all heard the stats about how it’s more expensive to attract a customer than retain them, but how exactly is this ongoing relationship so lucrative? Obviously, trust, a great customer experience, and a quality service or product are the bedrock for retaining customers. Ideally, though, your customer’s relationship with your company will expand over time, as opposed to stagnating.

As you learn more about your customer and their needs change, you have the opportunity to present upsells. You need to tread lightly, though, or else you risk damaging your reputation with customers.

When to Use Upsell Emails

There’s never a shortage of terms and jargon in marketing, so let’s review a few words associated with upselling.

Upselling encourages a customer to buy a more expensive version of your product or upgrade their account.

Cross-selling suggests related products or services to complement what the customer has.

The differences between upselling and cross-selling in SaaS emails have to do with what you’re suggesting and when. However, the best practices we’ll cover below apply to both strategies.

Are cart abandonment emails a form of upselling? While the core action of encouraging a customer to buy more than they were going to is similar between these emails, they aren’t the same. The upselling emails we’re going to talk about here are aimed at existing customers or trial users.

When you’re trying to wrap your brain around upselling emails, it’s useful to think about them in context. Here are a few scenarios when you would use an upsell email.

1. After a purchase. “Would you like fries with that?” is a classic upsell right before the sale closes. While you may choose to recommend upsells or cross-sells when someone is finishing a purchase on your site, upsell emails will come immediately after the sale.
2. At the end of a free trial. Upsell SaaS emails come at the end of a free trial when it’s time for a user to make a decision about rolling to a paid plan. Similarly, upsell emails are helpful to send when a user is nearing account limitations.
3. When a user hits a milestone. Sending upsell emails isn’t just a money grab: you’re presenting the best solution for customers. If a customer has reached a particular progress milestone or anniversary, it might be a good time to prompt them about a more advanced solution.
4. When you launch a new product. I already own an iPhone, yet Apple sends me emails about their latest devices, in hopes of me upgrading. You can do the same!

4 Ideas for Upselling Emails

Deciding when to send an upsell email is only a part of the equation for reaching maximum conversions. You also have to figure out what to sell and how to present it. Here are some upsell email best practices to add to your mental toolbox.

1. Remind customers of their progress.

Context is essential for nailing upsell emails that convert, and you can use your email to set the stage. In the example from Grammarly below, the reader is shown what they’ve accomplished with the company. The subject line “You were epically productive last week!” alongside personalized stats about being better than other users give the readers a confident boost.

Towards the end of the email, there’s a catch. Grammarly changes from reflecting on the past to looking ahead to the future. While the user has checked a lot of words with Grammarly so far, not having a paid account held them back. The offer to upgrade is positioned next to the advanced corrections that they missed out on this week by not having the premium account.

Another milestone that’s perfect for sending an upsell email is when users are approaching account limits. Rather than sending an upsell email when someone needs to upgrade now or face an interruption in their workflow, you should give customers a heads up about what’s to come.

Asana did just that in the email above. The email is short and sweet, but it plants the idea in the user’s mind that they need to upgrade soon. Then, when their account is at capacity, they aren’t blindsided with an upsell decision.

How to steal this trick: 

• Remind the reader how great it’s been being a customer before presenting the upsell. Highlighting how much value they’ve gotten from your products so far sets the stage for your ask for more. 
• Compare and contrast what can be accomplished with the customer’s current solution versus the upsell. 
• For foreseeable upsell opportunities, like account limits, give users a heads up so they can prepare to upgrade.

2. Personalize emails based on goals.

The more you’re able to personalize your upsell emails, the less it feels like an upsell. Take the example below from Freelancer. Based on the recipient’s actions (and inaction) on the website, Freelancer can deduce that the user has hit a roadblock. So, they’re using the opportunity to introduce their upsell recruiter service.

While the content of the email is good, the real magic here is the timing. If Freelancer tried to sell every new user on their recruiter service right away, it would feel very salesy. However, by personalizing the email for people who needed it most, they likely increased their conversions. Presenting too many upsell messages to customers who aren’t ready to upgrade can get annoying quickly. Instead of sending your upsell emails to everyone, think about which segment of your customer base would benefit the most from the product and figure out how you can send a targeted message to that segment.

How to steal this trick: 

• Remember that email personalization goes way beyond sticking a person’s first name in. 
• Send upsell emails sparingly. You’ll see better conversions if you segment your list and send offers only to the customers who would benefit most.
• Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Empathize with what a customer is going through and address the issues they may be facing.

3. Make upgrading as easy as possible.

Making the user experience as seamless, fast, and easy as possible is just generally a good practice. What does “easy” look like in upsell emails, though? Look no further than Dollar Shave Club. The company presents upsell options in an email that reminds a customer about their upcoming recurring order.

There are a few elements that make the upsell easier. First, the top of the email is a reminder about an upcoming order with the shipment date. That’s already a done deal, no work needed from the customer. Then, my favorite line of the email: “Toss more in?” It’s a casual phrase that makes it seem like it’s no big deal to add a few small items to the order. There are also individual “add” CTA buttons for each item, making it easier to narrow down what you want to add. The ease of upselling needs to extend beyond the inbox, too. Think about all of the steps a person will have to take to complete the upsell, and where on your site the email takes them. The best case scenario is being able to click “add” within an email and being directed to a payment page with the item already in their cart.

How to steal this trick:

• Be specific in your recommendations. Show a few single items as opposed to a general “shop more” that adds steps. 
• Send upsell emails when a person is already expecting to make a purchase or payment.
• Consider where an upsell email directs a customer, and what steps they’ll have to take to finish the purchase.

4. Use purchase momentum to educate (and upsell).

If a customer has just made a purchase or set up a paid account, you have their full attention. So what should you do with that attention before it moves on to something else? Show the customer the next step. What the next step is will vary between companies and customers, but you can take inspiration from big companies. First, there’s Frontier. For budget airlines, the upsell is more of a business model than a marketing tactic, so they have experience with these emails. Within the order confirmation email, the company shows some upsell and cross-sell options.

What’s clever, though, is that these additions are positioned as a checklist. While most of the checklist items benefit Frontier’s bottom line, it’s still useful for passengers who want to feel organized and prepared. Frontier has taken an upsell email and turned it into meaningful content.

Airbnb takes a similar approach. The email below is another order confirmation message, but there’s a cross-sell for Airbnb experiences down below. In the days leading up to the planned trip, Airbnb will send more experiences available to purchase. Similarly to Frontier, these are cross-sells that look a bit like content marketing within an email.

Here’s their confirmation email:

And here’s an additional cross-sell email for the city you’re headed to:

How to steal this trick: 

• Once someone has purchased your product, are there any add-ons that offer additional value to your customers? Consider adding those to your upsell email.
• Use cross- and upsells with care, especially when you present them right after a purchase. Someone just purchased an entry-level plan? Celebrate their choice rather than highlighting what they’re missing with their lower-tier product. 
• Cross-sells feel less like a marketing tactic if they’re merged with resources and content.

Where Should You Start?

The secret to creating high-converting upsell emails is to find the perfect blend of when to send, who to send it to, and what to suggest. If only! Upgrading your upsell email strategy will take a little work, but here’s how to prioritize where to start.

Do you have upgrades or cross-sells that customers are making on their own? Look for pairs of products that are purchased together or try to understand the context of a user upgrading their monthly plan. This will be your lowest hanging fruit.

When in doubt, start with your most engaged segments. If you’re just venturing into upsell emails, start with your most active customers. Prioritize upsells for customer anniversaries, or when they’re reaching account limits, or if they’ve made at least two purchases.

Start with the “what” and then figure out the “how.” Even if you don’t have data to link upsells or cross-sells that are already happening, you can likely make connections yourself. Think about your customer’s goals and string solutions together that would help them on a logical path. Once you have an upsell that’s valuable and makes sense, you can piece together when the most appropriate time to send it would be and how you want to position it.

Want to keep your new upsell email projects organized? Learn how to Simplify Your Email Workflow with the Litmus Power-Up for Trello.

The post 4 Strategies for Upselling Emails You Should Steal appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

What’s something that half of all internet users do four times a year? Forget their password. Not everyone fares so well, though. A little over 25% of people forget their password at least ten times a year, and 7% have to reset one of their passwords more than 16 times a year.

We’ve all been there, too. You don’t know if you’re on a website that requires a special character or if the company doesn’t allow them in their passwords. So you hit the “reset password” button. Then your hero, the password reset email, swoops in to save the day.

Seriously, password reset emails? Yes.

I get it. Password reset emails are probably so far down your priority list you haven’t even written it down. This is an easy-to-overlook email, but it’s more important than you might think. Here’s what a great password reset email can (and should) do:

• Arrive in the inbox immediately. Have you tested your password reset emails lately? These routine and borderline mundane emails still need to be tested, because they can’t do their job if they go straight to spam.
• Make it as simple as possible for your users to get back on track. You’re ready to complete an order or want to log into a tool—and then get stuck because you forgot your password. A forgotten password keeps your users from getting things done and your email has the power to bring them back on track, quickly. Make the process as easy and fast as possible.
• Reflect your brand personality. Just because password reset emails aren’t flashy campaigns doesn’t mean they shouldn’t live up to brand personality. Simple doesn’t equal boring.

Simply Beautiful Email Examples

Wondering how to spruce up your password reset emails? Here are five great examples of simple yet beautiful emails.

Jet

The example from Jet below is a perfect example of carrying branding through password reset emails. There’s plenty of white space in the email to focus attention on the “reset my password” CTA button. Still, a geometric header and footer in Jet’s brand colors frame the message.

Jet also had a bit of fun with the copy, too. They could have left the last line as a note to ignore the email if the user didn’t request it, but instead they added: “So that’s easy.” Those three words make the email feel more relaxed and less like a stuffy copy-and-paste template. 

But wait, there’s more! Jet also sends an email after a user resets their password. This message is crucial because it shows Jet considered the entire password reset journey. There are multiple steps, so they’ve created different emails.

There’s also a security aspect to sending a second password reset email. A person accidentally entering your email during a reset password is one thing, but it’d be a bigger problem if a stranger accessed your account and changed details. The graphics changed slightly between the emails, from a lock to a starred out password. However, the best elements, such as clear headers and CTA buttons, remained the same.

Jakprints

Resetting your password can be frustrating, and Jakprints takes the opportunity to be as service-forward as possible. Their password reset email below highlights their customer support outlets and happiness guarantee.

If somebody wanted to reset their password quickly, the essential information and bright green button are at the top of the email. The language they use in the copy lets the recipient know their account is still safe and secure. However, if there’s a more significant problem at hand, a user can scroll down to see the customer support phone number and email. If you’re looking to use this method in your own emails, just make sure that you’re setting expectations about when support is available, like Jakprints does here.

Lingo

Fun and bold likely aren’t the first words that come to mind when you think of password reset emails, but it’s the route Lingo has taken. Sunny yellow outlines their password reset email, drawing attention to the contrasting red CTA button.

They’ve also included an illustration to add some brand personality to what would be a plain, text-only email. Finally, Lingo opted for short and sweet copy, telling users, “not to worry, we got you!”

Square

Sometimes, the password reset process includes an authentication code. Square kept the focus on the code in their email below. A light grey box surrounds the contents of the email, and the all-important code jumps out in lime green.

The sign-in code numbers could stand to be a little larger, though. It also may be helpful to include a link to jump back into the app or site where the user needs to enter the code.

Password Reset Email Best Practices

No, password reset emails aren’t as exciting or revenue-driving as other transactional emails. However, they’re an opportunity to provide a seamless experience in the middle of a frustrating moment. Here’s what you can learn from the examples we reviewed:

• Make sure your subject line is clear, not clever. “Reset your password” or “[company] password reset” is perfect. 
• Keep designs simple with the main focus on a big and bold “reset password” CTA button.
• Switch up the standard copy to match your brand personality.
• Test your emails regularly to ensure they render well and don’t get caught in the spam folder.
• Keep security in mind. Customers can ignore accidental password reset requests, but let them know when a password change has occurred.
• Think about how the email fits into the reset process. Do users need to go back and forth between email and site? Once they reset their password, do you automatically log them back in?

Want to learn more about creating beautiful emails this year? Check out 10 Email Design Trends Hitting Your Inbox in 2020.

The post The Power of Simplicity: 5 of the Best Password Reset Emails appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

“Can you review this email for me? Sending you a quick test!”

“Hey, could you review the email I sent you the other day? Thanks!”

“Wait, where are Tom’s comments?”

If you’ve used any of these phrases in the past month, you probably have the email review blues. Symptoms include scattered feedback, conflicting comments, hours of bouncing between comments and editing, and an increase in headaches.

Unfortunately, it’s a trend our community is experiencing more and more. Over the past few years, our State of Email Workflows report has uncovered a shrinking percentage of marketers who feel their email review process is just right.

For some, the email approvals process is too burdensome. On average, marketers spend 4.2 hours gathering reviews and approvals for a single email, which is usually longer than it took to code it. Others may be struggling with an email review workflow that’s too lax, leading to errors slipping through the cracks.

Does it really have to be this way? Let’s explore.

What can ruin email reviews and approvals

In theory, you should be able to welcome the email review process with open arms. Anyone who has ever had a team member point out an obvious flaw that you totally overlooked understands how nice it is to get a fresh pair of eyes on your work.

So what’s the cause of this terrible review epidemic? There are three main culprits. 

Issue #1: Scattered Feedback

Imagine you want to make yourself a sandwich for lunch, but the bread is in the bathroom, the veggies are in the garage, and the cheese is in your coat closet. Walking around to gather the ingredients and meet back in the kitchen would be time consuming and annoying. 

It sounds like a ridiculous scenario, but it’s what email marketers have to deal with when they need to get feedback from different shareholders. We asked our community how they receive email feedback, and many marketers indicated that they use multiple channels to collect feedback on a single email.

The most common way to receive feedback was via email, with 75% of people saying they use this method. Oh, great. More stuff in your inbox! Understandably, this feels like a natural place to send comments as a reply to test emails, but important info can get lost in the thread. 25% of people who use Slack for feedback may face similar issues of hunting through conversations to find a particular comment.

Another popular method for gathering email reviews is verbally, with 28% managing reviews this way. While talking face-to-face with someone minimizes the chance you’ll have a misunderstanding of intent, it also doesn’t leave a “paper trail.” With everything else on your plate, you can easily forget the details of a conversation.

21% of marketers collaborate via Google Docs or other shared documents. The good news is this method consolidates notes a bit better than a conversation thread in email. There’s the added step of translating comments on one document to the actual email in another program, though.

The list of methods used to collect email approvals goes on and on. The problem isn’t as much about which channel you use, though. The headaches really start to pop up when different team members are sending comments through various methods. Then the project lead is left to reconcile all the information and translate it into actual edits.

Issue #2: No Established Workflow

Another issue that leads to email reviews dragging on is the lack of an established workflow. Simply put, if there are no expectations, nobody can meet them. It’s helpful to work out details such as:

• How quickly are people expected to share comments?
• What type of feedback are you looking for?
• Who has the final say about individual decisions?
• How do you handle conflicting opinions?

Without a standard operating procedure, you’re reinventing the email approval process every time.

Issue #3: Too Many Opinions

Finally, email reviews get overwhelming if there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Even a single feedback channel will feel overwhelming if there are too many people chiming in. It may be tempting to think that more feedback equals email perfection, but there’s a limit to how helpful more comments are.

Having a lot of team members involved in email review isn’t just bad for email marketers, either. Each additional department or manager you bring in has to take time away from their day to add comments. While some of this feedback is important, others may better serve the company by keeping their talents elsewhere.

How to create the email review workflow of your dreams

Email reviews are a bottleneck for many email teams, which simply means it’s a prime area for improvement. There are two levers you can use to overhaul your email approval workflow: the who and the how.

Limit the number of email reviewers to 2 or three team members

Improving your email review process starts with taking a good look at who is involved in your workflow.

The sweet spot of collaboration is having 2-3 people contribute to email reviews. This way, you can get a few opinions without having to cater to everyone’s preferences. These few people could be within your email team or stretch to departments such as legal. If you’re not sure who to eliminate from everyday email review, start at the top. That is, the executive team.

27% of marketers get feedback from the executive or operations team—and those teams are more likely to rate their approval processes as too burdensome. If this is still a valuable review process for you, then by all means, keep it. For most organizations, though, executive leadership would be better served consulting on high-level strategy, as opposed to single emails.

Agree on timelines and structure for the review process

After you’ve decided who’s essential to have in your review process, think about how it should be structured. What are realistic time frames for gathering and implementing feedback? Is everyone asked to review an email at once, or does it pass through different “filter” levels of review? Communication goes a long way in making sure everyone is on board with the same expectations.

Choose one tool to centralize all feedback

After sorting out your email review team and timeline, it’s time to get your tools in order. The most important part of the “how” of your email review process is that everyone uses a single method for sharing comments. Even a single very long email thread is better than an email, a Slack, a Google Drive comment, and a Post-It from your boss.

Cut email review times in half with Litmus Proof

If you want to make your life even easier, consider using Litmus Proof. This collaboration feature consolidates everyone’s feedback alongside your email code and tests. You can invite your core team to review, and they can leave comments on specific spots within the email.

You’ll get to ditch having to chase down comments, and your team will be able to see everyone else’s notes, avoiding duplicates. In addition to sharing proofs within your Litmus account, you can also share links to email proofs via a public link to attach to project management tools.

Curious? Learn more about Litmus Proof.

The post How to Make Collecting Campaign Feedback Less Painful appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Each year, we see new design trends shaping digital marketing—from the use of color and imagery to typography trends, interactivity, and more. In our “Trending in Email Design” series, we look at the hottest digital design trends—and dive into how they translate into email marketing.

Dark email designs have been gaining momentum over the last year as various email clients and apps have rolled out Dark Mode support. Bright designs can create a very jarring experience when viewed in Dark Mode, so designers have started to consider a “Dark Mode first” approach, crafting inspirational creative that looks great for all subscribers, no matter which color scheme they set their inboxes to.

Plus, even when your subscribers view your emails in the default bright mode, dark designs can help make your email stand out. With the flood of campaigns that take the traditional approach to email design—dark copy on a bright background—an email design that uses a reverse color scheme will catch your reader’s attention.

Which brands do dark email designs well, you ask? Get inspired by these beautiful examples. 

How are brands embracing dark designs?

Marvel

Design platform Marvel reaches out to developers in this neatly crafted email to discuss working with their API. Developers often set their machines or their code editors to Dark Mode due to the vast amounts of time spent at their screens reading and writing code. Marvel may have made the decision to make this a dark design when considering their intended audience.

Marvel combines the dark background with custom illustrations in white, featuring highlights in a bright, friendly blue—a stunning combination that stands out in the inbox.

ReMarkable

Black Friday gives designers the opportunity to get creative with dark styles whilst promoting themed offers. ReMarkable, who produces a writing and drawing device, uses bold typography and negative space to promote their offer in an easy-to-digest way. The orange CTAs add a touch of color to this otherwise simple design. The result is a stunning email design.

Eight Sleep

Eight Sleep promotes temperature control products that aid better sleep. The dark background with highlights in a cool blue creates a peaceful night time scene—perfect for promoting products that keep you cool at night.

Designmodo

You don’t have to work with black and white to utilize dark styles. In fact, using pure white (#FFFFFF) against pure black (#000000) is also known to strain the eye if you are presenting more than a single paragraph of text. Instead, we recommend working with very light and dark gray combinations for a better reading experience. You don’t have to limit yourself to shades of grey, either. Designmodo takes advantage of different dark and light tones of blue to craft this beautiful campaign.

Equal Parts

Cookware retailer Equal Parts have a number of bold colors in their brand palette, which they make pop against the dark backgrounds of their email designs. In this loyalty campaign they use the power of their bold color palette to take the reader on a journey, offering a fun, digestible, and beautiful way to absorb the details of their referral program.

The New York Times

When combined with bright, vivid colors, dark designs can be friendly and fun. But when paired with more muted colors, dark styles can set a completely different mood and evoke very different emotions.

This campaign from the New York Times is using a dark style to create a gloomy, serious look that’s a perfect fit for their new TV series documenting troubling topics.

Hulu 

It’s quite common to see dark styles utilized to promote TV and film, such as this example from Hulu for The Handmaid’s Tale. This dark and gripping drama just wouldn’t get the same promotional impact if framed within an email sporting a bright background. Instead, the dark design builds interest and atmosphere, beckoning the reader to “come back and watch.”

Bellroy Premium

Dark colors are often associated with elegance and formality, so brands looking to give their campaigns a premium look and feel may want to consider a dark color palette. Check out this campaign by Bellroy, an Australian accessories brand. Bellroy’s design team combines the power of a dark background, beige-golden shades, and a serif font to give this campaign a high-end look that’s perfect for promoting their premium range of accessories.

Loupe

Design conference Loupe created a simple but impactful campaign to announce that tickets have gone on sale. The use of a single bold color, negative space, and full width development make this one of my favorite dark email designs.

What’s your favorite dark style email?

We’d love to see your favorite examples of brands utilizing dark styles in your emails. Share them in the comments below.

The post Trending in Email Design: Dark Styles appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

You pull out your credit card, hit submit, and then the waiting starts. Admit it: Amazon Prime has spoiled you, and you have to remind yourself that shipment tracking isn’t available instantaneously.

The availability of fast shipping and hyper-detailed order tracking has made us all a bit, well, impatient. Most companies don’t have the scale or infrastructure for next-day delivery, so customers are going to have to wait.

You have a secret weapon at your disposal, though. Your order, shipping, and delivery confirmation emails are your customer’s peek behind the scenes. If customers have to wait, you may as well make it worthwhile.

Why these emails matter

Transactional emails are the revenue powerhouse of your email marketing program. Our 2019 State of Email research uncovered that a third of companies attribute 25% of their email revenue to transactional and triggered emails. One of the most important series of transactional emails you’ll send are around transactions themselves.

Nobody wants to submit an order online only to be met with radio silence or the bare minimum communication at best. Order, shipping, and delivery confirmation emails allow you to make the most of each sale. Here’s what they can and should do:

Keep customers updated and build trust. Order confirmation emails are all about transparency and keeping customers in the loop. 86% of Americans think transparency from a company is more important than ever, and 53% think clarity is transparency. Use these emails to let them know what to expect in the coming days.

Get customers excited about their purchase. Celebrate your customers! Let them know they made a great choice and join their excitement and anticipation. This way, you create a positive experience around each purchase.

Make waiting easier. Even the fastest shipping comes with a wait time, so give people something to do while they wait. How can they prepare? Is there a way they can share their excitement?

Best Examples of Order, Shipping, and Delivery Confirmation Emails

If you thought all order confirmation emails had to be cut and dry, think again. Here are six great examples of confirmation emails along the order and shipping journey. 

Fitbit

Remember how I talked about celebrating with your customers? Fitbit embodies this idea in their shipping confirmation email below. It only takes a quick glance to get the gist of the message. There’s a bright blue background with Fitbit products floating around the headline “Your Fitbit order has shipped.”

If you dig a little deeper, though, there are some copywriting gems. They celebrate the customer’s choice by writing, “Are you smiling? You’re totally smiling.” Fitbit also shows that they understand waiting can be hard and accompany the tracking link with “No need to camp out by the mailbox! Use this number to track your package.”

Beyond the fun nature of the writing, this shipping confirmation email also has the essential info. Fitbit tells the customer what they ordered, what it cost, when it shipped, what level of shipping they chose, and where it’s headed.

DoorDash

DoorDash also chose to put all of the critical details at the top of the email. In the order confirmation email below, the giant “your order is on the way” text paired with big red letters spelling out wait time gives readers what they need to know at first glance.

In addition to the standard order confirmation fare of address and order details, DoorDash uses this opportunity to introduce their referral program. It’s interesting to present the “earn $10 when your friends try DoorDash” proposition right after a customer has ordered. Free money is really enticing after just having to fork out cash for lunch.

Burst

Ordering and shipping a product is a journey, and the confirmation emails from Burst display this evolution. First up is the order confirmation email below. The emotion at the top of this email is gratitude, with the company thanking the customer for their order.

This order confirmation email also has a lot of details about the purchase. They list the order number and date, each product, and when the package is expected to ship. Another way they keep customers updated is the addition of “we’ll e-mail you again to let you know when your order ships.” This sets an expectation for the customer and they know to keep an eye out for another message.

When the shipping confirmation email arrives, the mood switches from gratitude to excitement. Burst builds anticipation with the headline, “Your order is on its way! We hope you are excited as we are.”

There are still some product details, but this email is more focused on tracking the package. Of course, Burst maintained its branding with bright blue and purple throughout.

Polaroid

Our final stop on this exploration of order confirmation emails is Polaroid, who is great at explaining the process in detail. First up is the order confirmation email below. I’ll be honest, I don’t understand why the illustration has a person holding a glass of milk on their head. Graphics aside, Polaroid uses the email to explain the order processing procedure in detail.

By reading the email, customers know how long processing will take and that another email with tracking info is forthcoming.

Next in the series is the shipment confirmation email. It has standard information, but the second paragraph is my favorite. Polaroid says that “refreshing the tracking over and over won’t make your package move any faster, so in the meantime, why not head over to our FAQs for instant photography tips and tricks?”

In one section, Polaroid both throws in a little relatable humor and lets customers know what they can do in the meantime. Content and resources are great to share during shipping.

Finally, Polaroid sends a delivery confirmation email. It lets the person know the order was delivered so they can look for it. Once again, Polaroid is excellent at keeping customers informed. They list where to find notes on the package’s location and who to contact if there’s an issue.

Order and shipping confirmation best practices

While emails are just one component of your order and shipping process, they can have a major impact on a customer’s experience. Here’s what you can learn from the examples we reviewed:

• Set expectations about the order and shipping process. Customers shouldn’t be left wondering what their status is.
• Thank and celebrate your customers to leave a favorable impression.
• Give customers something to do while they wait. Share relevant content or tell them about referral programs.
• Test your emails regularly to ensure they render well and don’t get caught in the spam folder.
• Include all order details in the confirmation email, from products and prices to expected shipping and delivery dates.
• Include contact information in delivery notification emails, just in case the package is missing.

Want to learn more about creating beautiful emails this year? Check out 10 Email Design Trends Hitting Your Inbox in 2020.

The post The Best Order Confirmation Emails Have Arrived appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

After taking the first steps by implementing these seven simple tricks to make your code more accessible and refactoring your bulleted lists for semantic accessibility, you might be wondering what to do next to optimize your email code for screen readers. No worries, we’ve got you covered!

Many of us already use role=”presentation” on our tables to streamline how our emails sound in screen readers and clarify our messages. That’s a great start. But what about all the other clutter? Ever since we added screen reader support to Litmus and did more research into email accessibility, we noticed that many elements marketers frequently use in their campaigns—including images, line breaks, and special characters—are a major challenge for screen readers.

Is your email accessible? Litmus’ Accessibility Checks make it easy to test your email against accessibility best practices. See how you can improve and make better emails for everyone. Learn more →

But how can you take advantage of these elements while still guaranteeing a great email experience for subscribers that rely on screen readers? On the most basic level, the solution is rather simple: You just need to hide any potentially confusing content from the screen reader.

In this post, we’ll look at some methods on how to hide content from screen readers and when and where to use them. Then we’ll look at real-life use cases that we’ve encountered in our own emails, so you can get some ideas for practical applications in yours.

3 Methods for Hiding Content from Screen Readers

There are three ways to hide content from screen readers, and each serve a different purpose.

1. style=”display: none;” or style=”visibility: hidden;”
   You might already be using these styles to hide content, such as preview text, from your emails. Congrats, that means this will hide it from screen readers too! But if you want users to actually see the content you want to hide from screen readers, try some of the methods below instead…
2. role=”presentation” or  role=”none”
   Again, many of us are already familiar with these methods from streamlining our tables. While this is very similar to aria-hidden=”true” in that it hides content from screen readers while still displaying them visually, the role attribute does not apply to any nested content while aria-hidden does. This is why any content in your tables with role=”presentation” is still read out, and why you need to apply role=”presentation” to every presentation table rather than relying on inheritance. Basically, the role attribute changes the semantic meaning of an HTML element—for example, telling a screen reader that a table is just there for presentation and not to be read as a data table—but doesn’t remove it altogether like aria-hidden does.
3. aria-hidden=”true”
   As we touched on above, this removes all children elements within the tag it’s applied to from detection by assistive devices. Also, it’s not recommended to apply this to any focusable element (something you can tab to when navigating on your keyboard, like a link) because this means that users can still tab to it, but it will appear to be empty to assistive technology, so be sure to apply carefully! Remember: No ARIA is better than bad ARIA. So where can you use aria-hidden=”true”? For the purposes of email, it’s safe to use it to hide purely decorative elements or duplicated content like repeated text.

Use Cases: How to Fix Common Screen Reader Issues

Stop a screen reader from reading out image descriptions

You might be tempted to use techniques like role or aria-hidden to hide purely decorative images, but remember to keep it simple. The <img> tag is already semantic by nature. To hide it from a screen reader, just give it an empty alt attribute like this:

<img src="yourpic.jpg" alt="" />

Screen readers announce special characters out loud

We found that a couple of our frequently-used special characters sounded a bit clunky on a screen reader. Since they were purely decorative and didn’t contain any nested content, it was safe for us to hide them with aria-hidden=”true”.

In this first example we use bullet points—an element thought to present unordered lists—to make a headline stand out. This, understandably, has the screen reader confused:

HTML (Before aria-hidden=”true”)

<p style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-weight:bold; font-size:20px; line-height:30px; color:#262524; text-align:center; margin:0; padding:0;">
    &bull; LOREM IPSUM &bull;
</p>

Screen Reader Transcript (Before aria-hidden=”true”)

bullet LOREM IPSUM bullet

Adding the aria-hidden=”true” label to the bullet points hides the decorative bullet points from the screen reader:

HTML (After aria-hidden=”true”)

<p style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-weight:bold; font-size:20px; line-height:30px; color:#262524; text-align:center; margin:0; padding:0;">
   <span aria-hidden="true">&bull;</span>
    LOREM IPSUM
   <span aria-hidden="true">&bull;</span>
</p>

Screen Reader Transcript (After aria-hidden=”true”)

LOREM IPSUM

Or check out this example: Do you see the little arrow at the end of this CTA button? It’s a great visual element to drive the subscriber to take action, but to a screen reader, it just doesn’t make sense:

HTML (Before aria-hidden=”true”)

<a href="https://litmus.com/" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size:18px; line-height:25px; color:#235BA8;">
    Click here&nbsp;&rarr;
</a>

Screen Reader Transcript (Before aria-hidden=”true”)

link
Click here right arrow

We can easily stop the screen reader from reading out loud the words “right arrow” like this:

HTML (After aria-hidden=”true”)

<a href="https://litmus.com/" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size:18px; line-height:25px; color:#235BA8;">
    Click here&nbsp;<span aria-hidden="true">&rarr;</span>
</a>

Screen Reader Transcript (After aria-hidden=”true”)

link
Click here

Line Breaks in Headlines

We discovered that when we needed to add a <br /> tag in our heading tags for design purposes, it resulted in the screen reader saying “heading level (number)” twice! So instead of:

heading level 2
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

A screen reader would read:

heading level 2
The quick brown fox
heading level 2
jumps over the lazy dog

HTML for above example:

<h2 style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-weight:bold; font-size:36px; line-height:44px; color:#262524; text-align:center; margin:0; padding:0;">
      The quick brown fox <br />jumps over the lazy&nbsp;dog
</h2>

Not a great experience, right? It gives the wrong impression that there are two <H2>s right next to each other instead of just one. There are a couple of ways to resolve this.

1. You can always shrink the width of the container so that you don’t need to add a <br /> to break a headline where you’d want.
2. If you can’t change your container dimensions for any reason, here’s a bit more of a nuanced technique. You can wrap the line you want to break in a <span> with style=”display:block;” applied to it, which breaks it into a new line.
   
   Then, you can add a responsive class=”inline” to it so the copy flows inline again once it hits below your mobile breakpoint. Then add an &nbsp; before the <span> to force a separation between the words for the screen reader, and an optional &nbsp; at the end of the copy to prevent orphans. See code examples below:
   
   <head> CSS

   @media only screen and (max-width: 640px) {
   .inline { display:inline !important; }
   }
   

   HTML

   <h2 style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-weight:bold; font-size:36px; line-height:44px; color:#262524; text-align:center; margin:0; padding:0;">
       The quick brown fox&nbsp;<span class="inline" style="display:block;">jumps over the lazy&nbsp;dog</span>
   </h2>
   

Styled Subject Lines (Unicode)

Perhaps you’ve seen fancy-pants subject lines like these in your inbox and thought, “Ooh, I want to try that!”

Well, you may want to think again. Not only can these subject lines come off as spammy—true story, this screenshot is from my actual Gmail spam folder—but they’re not accessibility friendly. This copy is comprised of Unicode, which is more similar to special characters or emoji than to semantic system text.

So for example, this subject line:

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗲

Would cause a screen reader to either skip over reading it at all, or read out the numerical code equivalents of every single character. Basically, it’s more suited for robot ears than human ears:

What’s the simple solution? Just use normal system text in your subject lines.

Emojis in Subject Lines

Speaking of subject lines, emojis have been trending in inboxes recently. After following guidelines on how to use emojis in your subject lines visually, you might want to consider how your emojis sound on a screen reader—both in your subject lines and in your email body.

Because you can’t use code like ARIA in your subject lines, your emojis are read out exactly as-is. Here are a few examples of how subject lines are announced by screen readers.

Subject Line: Claim your gift!

Screen Reader: Claim your gift! wrapped gift

Or…

Subject Line: This email is lit

Screen Reader: This email is lit smiling face with heart-eyes

Since we can’t hide subject line emojis from a screen reader and also don’t have a way to influence how screen readers read out the emoji description, it’s really important to use emojis in subject lines with care. If you’re using an emoji, make sure you know exactly how your subject line will sound. Here’s a handy guide on what description your screen reader will use for each emoji.

Emojis in the Email Body

However, you have more control over how to treat your emojis in your body HTML. So here are a few examples of how to code the line below:

We email!

Original Screen Reader Transcript:

We red heart email!

That’s not ideal, is it? Let’s look at how we can make the screen reader announce that we love email:

1. Code emojis as images with your preferred ALT text. Not only is this the only way you can ensure that your emoji renders uniformly across all email clients, but it’s also semantically correct.
   

   We&nbsp;<img src="emoticon-heart.png" width="22" height="22" alt="love" style="display: inline; margin: 0; padding: 0; vertical-align: -5px;" border="0" />&nbsp;email!
   

   Screen Reader Transcript
   

   We
   graphic
   love
   email!
2. Use ARIA to expose the emoji to assistive devices as an image, and give it an accessible name that you prefer.

   We <span role="img" aria-label="love">❤</span> email!
   

   Screen Reader Transcript
   

   We
   graphic
   love
   email!
3. Hide the emoji. We would recommend using this very sparingly. For example, the “We email!” example would not be the best application to hide emojis. It would look and sound something like this:
   

   We <span aria-hidden="true">❤</span> email!
   

   Screen Reader Transcript

   We
   email!

    

   Because aria-hidden=”true” hides this element from screen readers, adding an aria-label to it will not re-expose it. It just remains completely hidden. As a result, we would only recommend using it in situations where the emojis are purely decorative and hiding them makes sense audibly like in the following example:

   We love email!

    

   Original Screen Reader Transcript

   We clapping hands love clapping hands email! clapping hands

    

   So let’s take a look at coding this with aria-hidden=”true” to hide the clapping hands emojis.
   

   We <span aria-hidden="true">👏</span> love <span aria-hidden="true">👏</span> email! <span aria-hidden="true">👏</span>
   

   Screen Reader Transcript

   We love email!

How does your email sound when read out loud by a screen reader?

1.3 billion people live with some form of visual impairment and many rely on screen readers to consume online content, including emails. Litmus lets you listen to an audio recording of your email before you send, so you can be sure subscribers using screen readers will have a great experience.

Learn more about accessibility testing in Litmus → 

Ultimate Guide to Email Accessibility This guide has the insights and step-by-step advice you need to write, design, and code emails that can be enjoyed by anyone—regardless of their ability. Download the ebook →

The post Special Characters, Emojis, Line Breaks: More Tricks for Optimizing Your Emails for Screen Readers appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Your email service provider is the beating heart of your email program. It’s what connects your team’s ideas with your customer’s inbox, and it’s usually a big budget decision.

With so much riding on a single tool, choosing the right one can feel daunting—and now we’re talking about choosing multiple?

Yes, but don’t fear. There are scenarios when two—or three, or four—ESPs are better than one.

In our latest State of Email Service Providers Report, we explored how teams of all sizes and structures send their emails. What we found were some scenarios that just might do better with multiple ESPs.

Larger companies have more ESPs—but why?

Large companies have more resources and special considerations than small companies, so it isn’t too surprising that they approach ESPs differently. Most companies aren’t just going to throw money each month towards multiple ESPs for no good reason, though.

So what’s the reasoning behind what we found in the State of Email Service Providers report?

First, let’s look at ESP habits of different-sized companies.

Companies with 100 or fewer employees are the most likely group to be ESP monogamous. 48% of these small firms use one ESP, and 31% use two.

Medium-sized companies with 100-1,999 employees are the group most likely to use two ESPs, with 34% of respondents choosing that answer.

Then, we have large businesses. These 2,000+ employee companies are more likely to use four or more ESPs than smaller companies, with 11% of respondents having an expansive collection of tools.

But what are the benefits of using multiple ESPs in larger companies? It might come down to a few factors.

Specialization around different types of emails

Sending different types of emails is common with every company, no matter its size. Transactional, promotional, and triggered emails benefit teams at all levels, but large companies may want more specialization. Adding extra ESPs might bring additional features into the mix that boost certain types of campaigns.

For example, some companies need a separate ESP that connects to their app or CRM to send triggered emails. These software companies may choose to use a more sophisticated ESP that can handle complex rules or has an API. Smaller teams (with smaller budgets) can do a lot with a general email marketing tool. However, large companies have the time and resources to use tailored tools. 

Protecting transactional email IP address

Delivery rates are essential to monitor. It’s not surprising, then, that companies want to do what they can to ensure delivery rates and deliverability, especially on critical account-related transactional emails. Using a different ESP for transactional and marketing emails protects your email program in case of a delivery rate disaster.

If marketing emails were to start hitting spam traps suddenly, transactional emails sent from the same IP address might not make it to subscribers. By having different ESPs, or at least different sending accounts on the same ESP, you isolate the impact of poor delivery rates.

Greater cross-channel capabilities

Finally, multiple ESPs benefit bigger teams working across marketing channels. For example, Oracle Eloqua is used by 9% of large businesses for campaign management across the buyer’s journey. Adding more ESPs to a team’s rotation may also offer greater omnichannel analytics and personalization.

Team structure impacts ESPs more than team size

Surprisingly, there was a greater split between single- and multiple-ESP teams based on team structure, not team size.

56% of centralized teams use one email service provider, but only 39% of decentralized teams do the same. On the opposite end of the tech stack, 3% of centralized teams and 10% of decentralized teams use four or more ESPs.

The reasons for decentralized teams to use multiple ESPs vary from the decision on company size alone.

Geographic preferences may sway decentralized teams

It’s worth noting that big companies are more likely to have decentralized teams, and geolocation is the most popular decentralization format.

Why does this matter? Well, our report uncovered regional preferences in ESPs. Teams working in different parts of the world may have their own predispositions towards various tools, because certain ESPs provide local language support or because they’re compliant with local laws and regulations like GDPR that others might not follow. As a result, decentralized teams with strong, autonomous local teams are more likely to utilize multiple ESPs.

Explore the most popular ESPs by Geolocation What are the most popular email sending tools in the US and Canada, Europe, and other parts of the world? Download Litmus’ State of Email Service Providers report to get the details. Get your copy →

Different products or divisions have varying needs

Another common way to split up email teams is by product or division, such as B2B vs. B2C. If a company has teams working with separate customer personas or sending varying types of emails, it might make sense to use multiple ESPs. Brands that work independently under the same umbrella company may also opt for separate ESPs. Finally, companies that split up teams to work on particular tasks, such as marketing automation, may opt for multiple ESPs.

Though our report didn’t cover these types of decentralization in particular, it did explore ESP preferences between industries. For example, Adobe Marketo is most popular amongst tech companies, and retail companies opt for Salesforce Marketing Cloud most often. It is possible, then, that email teams across divisions have specialized needs.

See which ESP is most popular in your industry Which email service providers do retailers, nonprofits, tech companies, and more prefer? Download Litmus’ State of Email Service Providers report to see industry-specific ranks. Get your copy →

Should you use multiple ESPs?

Choosing an ESP is a critical decision, especially when you consider the potential ROI of email. The importance is compounded as you add more tools to your company’s workflow. Here are a few scenarios where multiple ESPs might be in order:

1. You want greater control and customization across different types of emails
2. You need additional tools to plan, send, and analyze cross-channel campaigns
3. Your decentralized teams have regional preferences
4. Your decentralized email team is focused on a particular division with differing priorities

Does your email team use multiple ESPs? If so, why? Comment down below to share your experience.

Want to learn more about the ESPs your peers use and love? Download the latest State of Email Service Providers Report here.

The post Does your brand need more than one ESP? appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Email is a serious business. I mean, anything with an ROI of 42:1 deserves to be respected.

That doesn’t mean you can’t (or shouldn’t) have a little fun while you’re at it. There are plenty of big ways to make your email marketing better, from personalization to interactive design.

We started to wonder, though, are there any small ways to make your email stand out? What are the clever little touches that can delight readers or leave a lasting impression?

Thus began an easter egg hunt for small ways to add brand personality to an email.

5 Little Email “Wow” Moments

What seemed like a tough task at first eventually unfolded right before our eyes. If you tune into golden nuggets of email wonder, you’ll find them. These small ways to add brand personality revealed five main themes.

Give Your Footers and Unsubscribe Messages More Personality

The tiny text at the bottom of an email is the ultimate opportunity for incognito brand personality. There’s standard information that every email needs, such as copyright info or unsubscribe links, but that just means there’s an opportunity to bend the rules.

The best example of this comes from none other than Really Good Emails. Every single line of the footer is infused with personality. Instead of saying “this message has been sent to you because you’re subscribed to updates from Really Good Emails” they write:

“We sent this email to you because of your insatiable thirst for email inspiration that does not make your eyes burn like you were thrown into a lake of raw onions—ugh, the worst.”

The footer then goes on to offer a creative take on their copyright, address, and unsubscribe link. It’s perfection.

Show the Team Behind the Message

Another way to connect subscribers to your company and inject personality is to show the team behind the work. If you’re subscribed to Litmus’ weekly digest emails, you may have noticed the footer below. (If you aren’t subscribed, please join us!)

As you can see in our Litmus example, showing the team behind a message doesn’t have to be complicated. A face, name, and title go far in reminding subscribers that there are real humans on the other end of the email.

If you want to showcase your team and story fully, look to A Kids Book About for inspiration. The children’s book company uses the welcome email to introduce more than just their products.

The email starts with an excerpt about the origin of the company. It explains who created the first book, why he did it, and how the company has grown. The welcome email also expands on the company’s mission, and finally, their team. Including pictures of the founders as kids is another fun touch. The welcome email is the perfect spot to give a behind-the-scenes look at your company.

Show Customer Appreciation

In addition to showing love for your team and history, you can use email to send appreciation to customers. While you may have the occasional “appreciation” campaign or promotion, there are small ways to incorporate your gratitude more often.

For example, Dreamhost includes a “customer since” banner in their emails, shown above. This is a simple way to customize an email while reminding users of their journey with your company. If you choose to highlight a metric in each email, make sure that it has the same effect for your less engaged users. For example, seeing a zero in terms of sales made or tasks completed isn’t motivating, but using a date remains neutral.

Provide Your Company’s Perspective

A company with a strong stance is one that stands out. If your team has a perspective or an opinion that strays from the industry norm, you should use it to your advantage. While actions speak louder than words, and you shouldn’t claim to have an opinion you don’t, keeping your perspective top of mind helps customers identify with you.

Lush, for example, has a unique approach to personal products. While their stance is solidified by the fact that they walk the walk, it doesn’t hurt to remind subscribers of your views.

At the bottom of the promotional email above, Lush includes their position on business. The banner consists of statements such as “fighting animal testing,” “ethical buying,” and “naked! packaging.” Including your company’s outlook at the bottom of every email is helpful for both existing customers as well as potential customers who may be learning of your brand thanks to a forwarded email.

Another company that keeps its value prop front and center is Papier. The bottom of their email features a footer that explains “why pick Papier.”

There are three reasons: designer collaborations, quality, and personalization. For past customers, these points act as a reminder of what else there is to explore with the company. For potential customers, the perspective differentiates the brand from other options.

Use Relatable Headlines

This final category may not technically count as a “small” email element. After all, the headline is quite literally front and center. However, it’s still a spot where you can really stand out. Our first example is from Rudy’s, and it’s an abandoned cart message.

I’ve read many emails, but no header has ever been so relatable. Rudy’s says about finishing your checkout:

“Don’t put this off like a software update.”

In a single line, the company has shown me their personality, and it feels more like a friend than a company. The phrase instantly hits home and is memorable, which probably works to Rudy’s advantage.

Another company that uses fun headlines to their advantage is Chime. The email below is aimed at getting a person to try the service, and it starts off with the headline:

“That Feeling When Payday Comes Early”

Chime sets the tone for the message before someone even opens the email with the subject line “It’s kinda like the first day of summer vacation.” Rather than use a practical angle for presenting their early direct deposit service, they lean into feel-good scenarios we can all relate to. The lighthearted feel is also echoed in the illustration of a smiling cloud sending down money instead of rain.

Share Animations

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then surely a GIF is worth more. Using animations in email can give context to your message, and they’re just downright fun. Take, for example, Lyft’s scooter announcement email. A simple illustration would have sufficed, but adding a scooter doing tricks and spins makes the email way more fun.

Animations are perfect for building anticipation or curiosity. MOO does this perfectly in the example below. What could have been a standard product or promotion email is transformed into a Rube Goldberg machine with a simple GIF. Anyone who says they could resist wanting to cut the string is probably lying.

GIFs in emails are an extra special touch, as long as they’re used sparingly. Animations have the element of surprise that helps important emails stand out from the rest of your campaigns. Getting creative with animations is the perfect way to let brand personality shine through, and thinking outside of the box is a GIF superpower.

Bonus: Surprise with ALT Text

What would a post about surprising little email details be without a bonus at the end? Litmus used an email easter egg hunt to promote conference tickets, including tactics such as surprise ALT text.

A series of emails contained secret “golden tickets” to Litmus Live. The first to find the easter egg and tweet it out wins. With images turned on, a graphic in the first email looked like a simple design element.

However, when images were turned off, the alt text revealed a golden ticket.

While you probably won’t include something like a golden ticket in every email that goes out, you can still have fun with ALT text. The text should be descriptive, but descriptive doesn’t equal boring. In addition to adding brand personality, giving ALT text a little more attention creates a better experience for readers with images turned off.

Standing out amongst competitors, or everything going on in your customers’ lives, is tough. While you need to get the major components of your email program, such as workflow and testing, right first, you can add small details to make email fun. 

Do you have any great examples of emails that made you smile? We’d love to see them.

And if you’d like to see more great email designs, you can check out the 10 Email Trends Hitting Your Inbox in 2020.

The post Small Ways to Make Your Emails More Fun appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

“How will email marketing change by the end of the decade?”

We asked this question back in 2016 to 20 leading industry experts, and we have to say, some of their predictions felt pretty wild at the time. But how do they hold up now, a month in to 2020? Were their predictions on personalization and dynamic content, interactivity, integration, and privacy on point, or better made for 2030 instead?

Let’s take a look at a few.

Personalization & Dynamic Content

“By 2020, hyper-personalization in marketing will reach a significant level, along with rule-based triggers, assimilation of the mobile channel, and connecting data from other channels and platforms.” ~Jill LeMaire Redo

Personalization and dynamic content have without a doubt grown in popularity and use. Almost 60% of marketers say they always or often use personalization or dynamic content in their emails.

Email subscribers expect their emails to be geared for them—“one-size-fits-all” campaigns simply don’t resonate anymore. If your email campaign doesn’t connect with your audience, you won’t get the results and ROI you wished for.

But personalization is so much more than using someone’s first name or company name, even though that’s the most popular method of personalization in the industry right now. It’s also the easiest to implement. But there are so many other ways to hyper-personalize your emails and make your messages relevant—past purchases, past email interaction, geolocation, and more.

There are brands that already do a stellar job using data from different sources to create truly personal experiences, like GasBuddy:

By using specific user data from their app, GasBuddy provides valuable tips for the subscriber based on that data to improve fuel efficiency. Really cool to see and useful and hyper-personalized for each subscriber and his or her driving habits. This is a perfect example of using data in a smart way—but the majority of brands still have some room for improvement.

Interactivity

Our experts predicted that by the beginning of this email decade, the inbox would transform to power truly interactive experiences:

“Subscribers will be able to make purchases right inside a marketing campaign, without ever leaving their inboxes. Campaigns will offer more of an app-like experience, too, with embedded video and other interactivity.” ~Tom Klein

“Expect the inbox to continue to morph into a more dynamic environment mirroring the web. Great tools and innovations will move email from a static, ‘been there, sent that’ state to a highly customized message that can adapt based on marketing and subscriber elements.” ~Simms Jenkins

Interactivity is a very hot topic for email, but due to inconsistencies across email clients and devices—and ESP support—not a lot of marketers actually implement interactive elements in their emails. Our latest research found that only 23% of marketers have used interactivity in the past—and 45% don’t even have interactivity on their radar.

Again, there are some brands that continue to push the envelope of what’s possible in email and use advanced interactive techniques to transform a static email experience into a dynamic, engaging one. Harry’s sent out an in-email quiz that you can interact with in your inbox to determine which body wash and soap sent might be best for you.

Harry’s does an incredible job here, but interactivity hasn’t reached email marketing mainstream—yet.

Are you looking to get started with interactive email? Interactivity may seem intimidating or frivolous—but it doesn’t have to be. Check out our blog post on 6 interactive elements you can add to your emails today.

When it comes to emails that provide more app-like experiences, let’s turn our attention to AMP for Email. Love it or hate it, everyone is talking about it. Ever get an email notification when someone commented on your Google Doc? Notice how you can now comment back directly in Gmail, providing feedback without ever leaving your inbox? That’s AMP for Email in action.

To use the power of AMP, marketers have to work with an ESP that allows them to send that additional MIME type. Plus, the subscriber must open the email in an inbox that supports AMP. Limited support on both the sending and receiving side is the biggest hurdle for AMP adoption. Building an AMP email means more work. Email marketers have to create a separate MIME type that powers the AMP email. Spending additional development time for an email type that can only be seen by a limited number of subscribers might not pay off. So for 2020, we aren’t quite there yet with super interactive, AMP-powered emails—but the next few years might change that.

Privacy

“Now that Canada has shown several enforcement actions under their anti-spam legislation, the United States government is definitely looking at what CAN-SPAM is doing in light of some of the data breaches and people’s email addresses being made available.” ~James Koons

How we wish this one were true.

Here at Litmus, we believe that CAN-SPAM’s low bar for consumer protection, especially its failure to mandate opt-in for commercial messages, is woefully out of step with subscribers’ expectations and spam regulations in most other countries. This sets US brands up for failure in global commerce. An update to CAN-SPAM could have improved the standards for commercial emails nationwide. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen and the US Federal Trade Commission concluded its two-year review of CAN-SPAM by voting to retain the rules and make no changes. 

But just because CAN-SPAM didn’t get touched doesn’t mean the predictions about an increased focus on consumer privacy were wrong. In the US, we’re now seeing individual states step up to raise the bar for more consumer protection. As of January 1, 2020, the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) went into effect and is considered a precursor to a national standard.

On the other side of the pond, the European Union has proven that it doesn’t shy away from issuing significant fines to brands that don’t follow the strict privacy guidelines set under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):

• The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office fined British Airways £183 million for a data breach that exposed logins, payment cards, names, addresses, and other information for half a million customers.
• The French National Data Protection Commission fined Google $57 million for failing to get “unambiguous consent” before using people’s data to personalize ads, as required under GDPR.
• In July 2019 the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office announced its intention to fine Marriott International nearly £100 million for infringements of GDPR.

Entering 2020, regulations to protect consumer’s privacy worldwide are stricter than ever before, putting subscribers in control of what marketing communication they want to receive and when. That’s great news for marketers—and a trend we hope to see continue in the decade to come.

Email and Your Marketing Stack

“In the next 5 years, however, email will be seen as not just a high-ROI channel by itself but rather a platform that integrates with and makes other channels more successful.” ~Loren McDonald

First thing’s first: email is still your most valuable and measurable channel, with the latest ROI numbers coming in at $42 for every $1 spent on email. So the good news is, the 2010s didn’t kill email, like so many said it would.

The step many brands haven’t quite reached is sharing their email marketing learnings with the rest of the marketing organization and beyond. Your email subscribers can teach you about the content that resonates most, whether or not your emails lead to a conversion, how long they engage with your email, and so much more. These insights are valuable for every team.

Our latest research shows that a third of marketers don’t consider email to be integrated with the rest of their marketing program. That’s a missed opportunity. For 2020 and beyond, many brands still have room to grow when it comes to email helping other channels become more successful.

Preparing for a New Email Decade: Here’s What the Next 10 Years Have in Store for Email Marketers

Looking into the future has become a tradition here at Litmus, so together with fellow industry experts we’re taking a look into the crystal ball again and dive into what the next decade will bring for email marketers. 

Curious how email strategy, design, privacy, teams, and email marketing technology will change in the years to come? Download your copy of “The Future of Email Marketing in 2020 and Beyond.”

Download the report→

The post 4 years ago, we asked leading experts for their email predictions for 2020. Were they right? appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Think about your own email inbox. How many emails did you get in the past day? The past hour, even? How many did you actually look at and enjoy, and how many did you just delete without opening or unsubscribing?

Your subscribers are inundated with thousands of marketing messages every day, so it’s easy for messages to get lost in the noise. If they haven’t engaged with your emails for a while, maybe it’s because they’re getting lost in that noise—or maybe they’re just not interested in hearing from you anymore, but haven’t unsubscribed yet.

This is exactly where a re-engagement email comes in. Re-engagement emails can serve a few different purposes: letting your subscribers know what they’re missing out on with your content, giving your subscribers options to opt-down or officially unsubscribe, or just seeing why they haven’t been engaging with your emails. You’ll learn more about what your subscribers want from you and why they haven’t been engaging—and if you lose some subscribers along the way, that’s okay.

Here are 5 tips for creating re-engagement emails that will bring your subscribers back.

1. It’s not about you, it’s about them. Don’t make your subscribers feel guilty.

Of course, the ultimate goal with re-engagement emails is to get your subscribers interested in your emails again. But it’s important to think about what your subscribers want to get out of their relationship with you. Is it product updates? Email-only deals? An amazing, curated list of articles to read? Use your re-engagement email to remind your subscribers of the value they get out of your emails.

Android Authority does exactly this with their re-engagement email. They pull you in to engage with the email with the subject line “Are you there? ” to see if you’re still interested in hearing from them. They remind you what you’ll get with the subscription—Android news, reviews, giveaways, and deals—and allow you to update your email preferences or unsubscribe from the list entirely if you just aren’t interested.

The line between promoting the benefit of being a subscriber and making people feel guilty can be a thin one. Take this example from Framebridge:

While it may be effective, it flirts with dark patterns. It’s one thing to say you’ll miss a subscriber if they go, but to say that, just because they’re not engaging with your emails means they aren’t interested in the product you have to offer, is too far. There are other ways to try and re-engage your subscribers and keep a little brand creativity without making your subscribers feel guilty for leaving or afraid they’re missing out on something.

2. Give your subscribers a few options. It shouldn’t be an “all or nothing” deal.

Maybe your subscribers have stopped engaging because they were only interested in some of your seasonal promotions, or you’re sending them too much email. It’s possible they haven’t unsubscribed because they still want to hear from you, just not this much.

In this case, providing your subscribers with an opt-down or an email preference center instead of “Unsubscribe or Bust” is a good bet. Maybe your subscribers aren’t interested in your product updates or offers, but engage with every single webinar or ebook email you send out. Give them the opportunity to stay subscribed to the emails they’re interested in, like Animoto does in this example.

3. Keep your brand’s personality intact.

Nothing says “unsubscribe” like a really, really boring re-engagement email. If you have a distinct brand personality, chances are that’s a big reason why your subscribers wanted your emails in the first place, so why would you drop that for your reengagement email?

Really Good Emails does an excellent job of checking in with you to make sure the information they have on you is correct. Maybe you’ve been engaging with their emails all along, but maybe not—and making sure they can get their personalization correct for you is an excellent excuse to get subscriber engagement. The look and feel of this email matches what you’ve come to expect from RGE: conversational, quirky, and a little off-kilter. Exactly the reason you subscribed in the first place.

Curious how to inject some more brand personality into your re-engagement emails? Check out our latest blog post for 5 small ways to make your emails more fun.

4. Let your subscribers know what they’re missing out on—and maybe sweeten the deal.

It’s easy to forget why you may have subscribed to emails. Maybe you were interested in the product or app at first and your interest dwindled, maybe you signed up for a one-time deal that you cashed in already. Whatever the reason, your subscribers may have forgotten exactly why they signed up for your emails in the first place. A re-engagement email is the best way to remind them.

Udemy uses their re-engagement email to remind subscribers of what this subscription really gives them—exclusive deals, course updates, and even personal recommendations based on interest.

But to sweeten the deal, Udemy adds an incentive—your next course for $10—if you confirm your mailing list subscription. They send a reminder email, too, and a closer look shows that the “deadline” for confirmation is extended a bit. Udemy wants to provide a “thank you” for remaining a subscriber, complete with a gift.

5. If you aren’t sure why they aren’t engaging with your emails, ask them.

It seems obvious, but sometimes it’s easy to forget: if you aren’t sure what your subscribers want out of your emails, ask them! Re-engagement emails are a great place to do so. Maybe you’re sending out a lot of content about one topic, but your audience is really interested in another one. You won’t know that unless you ask them.

Bespoke Post does a great job of asking its subscribers what they’re interested in with their tagline, “Turn our boxes into your boxes.” By allowing each subscriber to say whether or not they’re interested in things like hiking or watersports, they can tailor more relevant emails to them. Steal that idea for your re-engagement campaign.

Have any other tips for creating and sending excellent re-engagement emails? Let us know in the comments!

The post How to Win Subscribers Back: 5 Tips for Creating Effective Re-engagement Emails appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Email marketing is about more than just, well, email. And marketing. Like any other profession or pursuit, most of what we do in the email industry comes down to our relationships with others. Whether it’s our subscribers or stakeholders, how we communicate with people, our daily interactions, and what we learn from each other is what really matters.

Our own research has shown that email marketers are working with more people than ever to get emails out the door. Most email marketers deal with at least 2 departments and an average of 3 or more people to get an email reviewed and approved.

One talk from Litmus Live 2019 really highlighted our need for better communication and more thoughtful relationships in the email world. In this post, we’ll look at Sarah Esterman’s excellent closing keynote, How to Work With People, which you can view in its entirety below.

CONTENT WARNING: During her talk, Sarah shares her own personal health experiences, including talking about food and weight loss.

Through the lens of her own personal experiences, Sarah—a lifecycle marketing manager at Webflow—identifies key ways that we can work with one another and create more resilient and respectful relationships, both in our work and everyday life.

Get Litmus Live Updates Be the first to hear about this year’s premier conference for email marketing professionals. Sign up now →

Working With People is Hard

Even good team situations have problems, especially under the stress of email deadlines and scant resources. Even in the best situations, different experiences and abilities can lead to friction and stress.

In her own life, Sarah’s health has impacted her relationship with co-workers and the typical team bonding experiences most of us take for granted. Managing symptoms and weight loss means that traditional office experiences, offsites, team meals and drinks, and even regular conversations with colleagues can be very stressful and difficult to manage.

Although not everyone is in a situation like Sarah’s, we all regularly encounter issues with co-workers, bosses, customers, and subscribers that make identifying the right way forward hard, if not impossible. The first step to better working with people is understanding that it’s hard for everyone. And, as Sarah notes towards the end of her talk, figuring out what makes work hard for you can lead to insights that make it easier for others to work with you.

It’s All About Communication

While researching her talk, Sarah identified four ways in which people communicate with one another:

• Passive: Avoids expressing feelings and conflicts at any cost.
• Aggressive: Demands their own needs to be met at the expense of others.
• Passive-aggressive: Appears passive but isn’t, has built up anger or resentment.
• Assertive: Sets clear boundaries, asks questions instead of assumptions, and is honest, direct, and respectful.

While most of us use all four forms of communication, more often we default to one. Understanding how we communicate—and how those we work with communicate—can help alleviate issues on both sides of the table.

Many professionals have dealt with aggressive or passive-aggressive stakeholders, bosses, or colleagues. While resentment can build when we default to passive roles when dealing with others, practicing being assertive can help prevent issues—or remedy existing ones—instead.

Sarah has a great example of being assertive.

As we all know, last-minute changes can come in for an email campaign, destroying well-honed processes and deadlines in the process. Imagine your boss asks you to stay late a few nights this week to get a campaign out the door.

While most of us default to one of the first three responses below, the fourth option will almost always be a better choice.

By showing you understand the business’s needs, and asserting your own needs, a healthy compromise can be worked out—one that prevents anger and resentment from seeping into a good working relationship.

Understand Power and Privilege

A lot of work issues arise through power struggles or our inability to recognize privilege in ourselves and others. Think about the power relationships at work in your own job:

• Managers have power—including the power to hire and fire—over their direct reports. They can impact their livelihood and health, for better and worse.
• More tenured colleagues can have power over others, regardless of whether or not they are managers.
• Clients have power over freelancers, who have few protections or recourse in abusive relationships.
• Marketers have power over subscribers by dictating what emails are delivered when, and what kind of content is in those emails (often based on assumptions, not data).

On top of power dynamics, privilege—what Tatiana Mac defines as, “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted to only a particular person or group”—plays heavily into our working relationships and the work we do on behalf of subscribers.

Sarah is right to point out that it’s very easy for anyone to forget or not notice their own privilege and power, and how that privilege far too often puts them at the center of their work. But it’s important to recognize that our experiences are not the same as those we work with and the subscribers we send to. Identifying power dynamics and our own privilege, as well as recognizing the experiences of others, will lead to better communication and all around better working relationships, with our stakeholders and subscribers alike.

Practice

No one is going it alone in the email industry. Even freelancers or solo business owners are working with subscribers and customers. And working with people is hard.

Sarah makes it clear that all of this can be messy and confusing, but there are key ways in which we can make working with others better. Beyond understanding different communication styles, power, and privilege, the best way to get better at working with others is to practice.

Practice being assertive instead of passive, aggressive, or a mix of the two. Practice recognizing your own privilege and educate yourself on the experiences of those who are different from you. And practice being open, honest, vulnerable, and respectful.

If we can all take Sarah’s advice, then the future of work doesn’t have to be stressful. Even as we work with more people, and more departments, to get emails delivered, we can do so in a healthier, more productive way.

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The post Litmus Live Spotlight: Sarah Esterman on How to Work With People appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Remote working is definitely having a moment, empowering brands to collaborate with each other and connect to customers and partners from great distances. When you can’t meet face-to-face, your email program can quickly become your most effective channel to create personal connections, bridge social distances, and build lasting relationships.

In a digital and mobile world, email is the most personal way to communicate with your subscribers. Unlike other marketing channels, like paid social or SEM, when it comes to email, your customers are specifically opting-in to receive your communications. They’re asking to hear from you. They’re inviting you into their inbox and trusting you to deliver actionable insights and a great experience. 

Email also allows you to personalize your communications beyond other marketing channels, essentially creating a 1:1 communication between you and your customers. With advanced targeting and personalization capabilities, like triggers based off of an action (or lack thereof), you can send your customers communications that provide useful information at exactly the right time.

It’s not surprising that brands who rank high in customer experience often are bolstered by a highly effective and personalized email marketing program. The ROI of effective email marketing is unparalleled—organizations gain $42 for every $1 spent on email. In challenging times and when budgets are tightening, it’s a no-brainer for marketers to double down on reliable programs that deliver the best ROI, help them achieve their business goals, and support customer care. Now, more than ever before, the time is right to put email first in your customer communications and overall marketing programs mix.

Is your organization ready to put an email first strategy into practice? When the average consumer is bombarded with 5,000 ads per day, how do you break through the noise and ensure your message reaches the right audience, with error-free, on-brand content, at the exact right time and on any device? More importantly, with so many organizations moving to remote working, how do you flawlessly scale an email-first approach across your geographically dispersed marketing organization?

Companies like Zendesk, Altos and Namecheap are great examples of customer-centric organizations who put email first and are achieving significant and tangible business results. Check out these compelling facts and figures:

• Zendesk transformed the company’s email production process by empowering its global marketing team to build, test, and collaborate in one centralized system—saving the company 3 hours per email.
• Digital marketing agency Altos uses a centralized email workflow system to collaborate effectively, efficiently create flawless emails, and gain the insights they need to be trusted advisors to their clients. In doing so, they improved email accuracy by 25%, increased email deliverability by 20%, and accelerated time to market for new emails by 10%.
• Accredited domain registrar Namecheap streamlined their email production and approval workflow across 10+ internal stakeholders to create error-free emails, faster. They saved 2-3 hours per email by centralizing their email workflow for the entire team. That’s precious time for a company that depends on email to build and maintain the trust they have earned from their 2+ million subscribers.

Putting an email first strategy into practice might seem like a daunting task for organizations with worldwide teams and remote workforces. To help you get started quickly on this path, use this simple three-step framework to optimize your email program in these important areas: pre-send, post-send, and marketing performance.

Pre-Send

• Bridge social distances by collaborating in a central email system to streamline workflow, ensure brand consistency, and accelerate time to market for new customer-facing campaigns.
• Test every email on every client, device, and system—every time. Trust is paramount in uncertain times and no one wants to get stuck in a spam folder or have to send the followup “Oops, we made a mistake” email after an important customer communication.
• Invest in solutions that integrate seamlessly with the email service providers you have in place today. Time and budgets are precious and you need solutions that make the most of both.

Post-Send

• Go beyond basic open and click-through rates (they are table stakes) to understand the time of day people read your email, how much time they spent reading it, and what they did with it after they read it. 
• Harvest these powerful insights to get closer to your customers, increase engagement with your campaigns, and create personalized email experiences.

Performance

• Put email the center of your overall marketing programs mix. Share the insights gained from your email program with every member of your marketing team—especially your CMO. How customers engage with your email can tell you as much about your messaging and branding as a tracking cookie. These powerful insights can be easily applied to optimize your webinars, events (in person and virtual), and paid media programs.

In uncertain times, getting back to basics and taking common-sense approaches are valuable in so many areas of our lives right now. Email is your most trusted and reliable channel and the new normal to connect with your customers, show them you care, and assure them you are in this for the long haul. Utilize this valuable channel to build personal relationships with your customers—and ensure your team (whether distributed or not) is prepared to go email-first.

The post Email First: The New Normal for Keeping You Connected to Customers in Challenging Times appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Does your marketing team fear tighter privacy laws? It shouldn’t. The truth is, tighter anti-spam regulations force brands to implement tactics that have been email marketing best practices for a long time anyway. The result? Better email experiences for everyone.

Before the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May 2018, we heard dire predictions that the new, stricter laws would shrink email lists, throttle new opt-ins, and damage marketers’ use of email to achieve their business goals. Marketing teams everywhere became afraid that their lists would shrink along with their ROI.

Now, two years after GDPR went into effect, where do we stand? Let’s take a look. 

Strict anti-spam laws are not the death of email—they make it better

The truth is, marketers shouldn’t be afraid of tighter anti-spam regulations. Research into the impact of GDPR on email marketers indicates that stricter regulations are actually a good thing for marketers.

A clear majority of email marketers have not suffered the major list damage the doomsayers predicted, with 60% of brands who comply in full or in part with GDPR saying they saw either no effect on list size or a loss of less than 10%. The UK DMA’s 2019 Marketer Email Tracker Report found 56% of UK email marketers were positive about the impact GDPR is having on their operations. Among the responses, 41% said opt-out rates decreased, while 55% said spam complaints were down and 55% said email deliverability had improved.

Unengaged and inactive subscribers add little to no value to your email program, and GDPR has forced many brands to remove these email addresses from their mailing lists. While a cut in list size can feel like a loss to many email marketers, it can actually improve the performance of a brand’s email program.

Leading marketers understand that respecting subscribers’ privacy and putting their audience in full control of what information they’d like to receive is the secret to effective email—and embracing privacy laws like GDPR or CCPA is an important step on that journey.

In the next decade, brands will have no choice but to embrace new privacy regulations. If they don’t, they’re dangerously out of sync with customer expectations and also risk significant fines by the authorities. In January 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CCPA) went into effect and is considered a precursor to a national standard in the United States. More states and countries will step up when it comes to raising the bar for consumer protection worldwide, and consumers will have more control than ever when it comes to what email they receive and when.

The best programs will stay compliant and make subscriber retention a priority

Regulations like GDPR and CCPA result in better email marketing experiences for everyone, forcing brands to finally implement best practices that have been around for a long time. The size of subscriber lists is important—but the best email marketers know the performance matters more. Plus, since many of the email acquisition tactics that brands relied on to grow their lists are no longer compliant under GDPR and other laws, a focus on retaining subscribers will be more important than ever.

There’s a natural ebb and flow when it comes to unsubscribes. There are plenty of unsubscribe methods out there, and not all of them are ideal. Some of them make subscribers feel ignored, lack empathy, and are overly complicated. Keeping subscriber retention in mind, it’s more important than ever to provide your subscribers with options—maybe they want to “snooze” emails from you for a while, or only want to hear from you a certain number of times a month, or only for certain topics. If you provide options for what kind of communications they’ll receive, you’ll find that subscribers will be more likely to stay connected with your brand.

In the next decade, consumer privacy will become the highest priority, but interest in email won’t go away. Email marketers must respect their subscribers’ privacy and allow them to unsubscribe at any time. Offering the option to opt-down can be a powerful way to stop subscribers from cutting the cord with your brand, but in times where subscribers are in full control of what marketing they’d like to receive, brands have to focus more than ever on one thing: Focusing on hyper-personalized and targeted campaigns that provide true value to your subscribers and will keep subscribers interested.

What does the future hold for email strategy, design, teams, and more?

We asked leading industry experts about how some of the most crucial elements of email marketing will change in the next decade. In this ebook, you’ll find their collective predictions on what the next 10 years hold for email design, strategy, teams, and more.

Get your copy →

The post Predictions for the Future of Email Marketing: Why It’s Time to Embrace Stricter Privacy Laws appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

With the emergence of the coronavirus (COVID-19), brands are being forced to quickly act and adapt to a situation that changes daily. Email is the most powerful channel to stay connected to your customers, so brands are turning to their email marketing teams to keep customers and prospects informed—and to build trust in times of uncertainty.

Is your inbox already filled with notifications about COVID-19? Ours are, too. With the influx of emails related to the topic, subscribers are growing skeptical of the messages they are receiving, and rightfully so. Unfortunately, we run the risk of alienating our communities by “marketing as usual” during trying times. 

Now more than ever, it is important that your email messages align with best practices and that your messages are error-free.

Whether you need to send messages about impact to events, inventory, services, or to simply say things are operating as usual, here are some hands-on tips you should follow to make sure the emails you send in times of a crisis are error-free and build trust in stressful times—even if your team needs to send them ad-hoc.

1. Validate Your Sender Name and Preview Text.

While it’s sensible that many of these messages are sent on behalf of a company’s leader, ensure the sending email address is properly authenticated and the sender name (or from name) also shows the association to your company. For example “John Jones (CEO, Company Name) <hello@companyname.com>”. In addition, you can use the preview text to help increase your open rates by leveraging this field to further reassure your audience this is a legitimate message from your organization.

Optimize your preview text and avoid the dreaded “if you are having problems with this email” or “click here to view online” text showing up in the inbox. Instead, use a descriptive preview text that supports your subject line and—as the name suggests—provides a preview of the content your subscribers will find in your email. With our Ultimate Guide to Preview Text Support you can get some guidance on how to optimize your preview text.

2. Avoid only using an image for your message.

Sending an email that’s made up entirely of images will prevent screen readers, or subscribers who have images turned off, from viewing your messages. The email user has come to understand that an email with mostly text is warranted for this type of message and many times we have seen plain text messages outperform heavily-formatted emails.

3. Avoid unnecessary calls-to-action.

If you include unnecessary calls-to-action or secondary messages, you risk diminishing the genuineness of your message. Do include a point of reference should they want to read more information or simply navigate to your website.

4. Be mindful of your segments.

Not everyone in your list may need to receive a notification about what your company is doing about the recent events. There is a lot of noise at the moment, so you want to make sure your message resonates and that it’s not just another message capitalizing on the current situation. For example: if you’re a retailer and some of your local stores are closing as a precautionary measure, make sure you’re segmenting your list by geolocation to ensure you’re only notifying the subscribers who’re impacted by this update.

5. Keep a close eye on your deliverability metrics.

With the increase in overall volume that is being sent out, we have started to see changes in email filtering as email clients are trying to process the incoming messages. Here are a few tips to help keep your deliverability strong:

• Avoid high-volume sends that may stand out from your usual pattern. Consider breaking up these sends into smaller batches which can be sent over a few days. 
• Now is not the time to send to your entire database, especially those users that have previously opted out of your program.
• Leverage email campaigns with high engagement rates and send these announcement emails after those. This can help offset any lower engagement of these larger sends. Keep in mind that email clients look at the overall engagement of your messages in addition to your reputation as a sender and the integrity of your code and message.
• Monitor your inbox placement and complaints very closely. Any increase in complaints could impact your chances of reaching your audiences beyond these one-off messages

6. Double-check your automated and triggered email.

When you’re creating new campaigns that are launching in the next few days, thinking about how your message might be perceived during a crisis comes naturally. Too often though, brands forget to take a close look at automated or triggered emails that might hit your audience during critical times. Take the time to take a close look at your existing nurturing emails, your transactional messages, and any other automated or triggered emails that a subscriber might receive. Put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes and ask yourself: Are there any subject lines that, under the light of recent developments, can come across as insensitive? Is there any email content—in both copy and imagery—that was effective last week but is inappropriate today?

Examples of brands that send thoughtful, empathetic emails in times of a crisis

If you’re looking for examples for how fellow email marketers master the challenge of writing and designing emails to stay connected to their subscribers during this global health crisis, check out this email collection from our friends at Really Good Emails.

The post 6 Tips on Sending Effective Email During a Crisis appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Your customers are complex beings. Treating them like one giant uniform crowd is not good for you or your subscribers because it limits messaging and lowers relevancy. Tailored messaging, at least some of the time, is vital.

While we talk a lot about one-to-one messaging in this industry, the one-to-some messaging that segmentation provides can boost relevancy, engagement, and ROI significantly. The trick is identifying the right segments. Some will be long-term segments that are tightly linked to customer personas, while others are of-the-moment segments that seize a fleeting opportunity.

Jen Rhee, Email Marketing Manager at online learning marketplace Udemy, knows a lot about segmentation and how it can power email marketing success. At The Email Design Conference, I was able to interview Jen about how marketers can make the most of email segmentation.

You can watch the full interview here, or read a transcript of it below.

I always get so shocked when people say, “Is email dead?” or “Email is kind of a cheap channel,” because I think if used in the right way, email can be a very powerful channel for you. At Udemy, email makes up more than 60% of our total revenue. And that’s because we really focus on our segments, and we really make sure each email that we send out is personalized.

Beyond Demographic Segmentation

There’s three different ways that I like to look at segmentation beyond demographics. The first is behavior, and that’s really what your customer is doing. What actions are they taking that are going to likely lead to a conversion? The second is engagement. So how are they interacting with your product or company? The third is psychographics, and that’s the trickiest one, but it’s really, Why did they first end up with you in the first place?

The Right Segments

There’s thousands of different ways you can create segments. You can come up with lots of different segments. It’s really important that you focus on the right ones, because we all have limited time and resources. So you want to look at which chunk of your users are generating the most profit, because it’s likely that a small percent of your users are very loyal customers. And focusing on them is going to give you the biggest return in the quickest way possible.

The Power of Email

I think that email is the most valuable channel because you have all this customer data that you can use to personalize your emails, so you can maintain that customer relationship. Out of all the other different marketing channels that I worked on, none of them can be as customizable as email. And you’re maintaining that relationship with email, so it’s super important, and you have to make sure that that message is so relevant to your customer.

More Expert Videos

• Gaining Email Marketing Insights from Big Data
• Email Marketing Success Metrics Vary by Subscriber
• The Pitfalls of Email Marketing Metrics & A/B Testing
• Will We Ever Have Email Coding Standards?
• Email Marketing in the Age of Data Breaches & Tightening Regulations

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The post Achieving Better Performance with Email Segmentation & Personalization [Video] appeared first on Litmus Blog.

As an email designer, it’s your job to provide subscribers with a functional email experience. This means eliminating friction that can erode the subscriber experience, and ultimately damage your brand image.

Achieving this goal is complicated by the fact that email is constantly evolving. It’s crucial to stay on top of the latest updates in the email world, especially when those changes—like new apps and updates to HTML and CSS support—can affect your carefully designed campaigns.

In the 2016 State of Email Report, we round up everything that happened in the email world last year, helping identify major innovations that can have huge implications for your email campaigns.

Get your free report →

Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find inside:

1. KEEP THE APPLE WATCH IN MIND

In April 2015, the Apple Watch was launched. The addition of wearables to the email app fleet was inevitable—and it’s bringing with it some major implications for email designers. If your audience includes tech early adopters and potential Watch users, then consider the subscriber experience on the Watch.

Since Apple Watch displays plain text when remote or linked images are detected, it’s crucial to optimize the plain text version of your emails. Also note that special characters, extra spaces, and other formatting tricks reserved for desktop plain text consumption translate very poorly to the Watch’s small screen.

There is also a more advanced option to add a third part to your message: text/watch-html. By including this additional part and specifying the Content-Type as “text/watch-html,” the Watch will display the text/watch part instead of the plain text part when the HTML part is unsuitable. However, be sure to check with your ESP before adding the Watch part—not everyone supports it.

2. OPTIMIZE FOR IMAGE BLOCKING

Outlook 2016 and AOL’s Alto Mail app were both introduced in 2015—and each block images by default. Email designers should use defensive design techniques like ALT text, bulletproof buttons, and a proper balance of imagery and HTML text to combat image blocking.

3. DON’T HIDE YOUR UNSUBSCRIBE LINK

In September 2015, Gmail rolled out new “block” functionality to all Gmail webmail and Android Gmail app users, giving consumers yet another option to rid their inboxes of email they don’t want. When a subscriber “blocks” a sender it means they’ll never see an email from that sender again.

The upside is that the new “block” option should reduce spam complaints because some subscribers who would have previously clicked “report spam” will now click “block” instead. The downside is that the “block” button may have created a new, lower bar for ISP intervention, so some subscribers who might have previously clicked “unsubscribe” will now click “block” instead.

So what should you do? Make it easier to unsubscribe. If subscribers can’t easily spot your opt-out link, some will simply block your message or mark it as spam. If your unsubscribe link is buried in small gray type, it’s time to break it out on a line by itself with larger, easier-to-read text.

In addition, add the “list-unsubscribe” header and Gmail will, in certain circumstances, place an “Unsubscribe” link after your sender name and sender email address.

While this link allows subscribers to skip your opt-out process—including the preference center, if you use one—it’s still preferable to getting a block or spam complaint.

4. UPDATE YOUR INTERACTIVE EMAILS

In September 2015, Apple released the latest version of their mobile operating system, iOS 9. This updated operating system added support for a few new CSS properties—and introduced a few changes that are bound to frustrate email designers.

One such frustration? The general sibling selector (~) is not always supported. Litmus Community members Rémi Parmentier and Justin Khoo both reported that the general sibling selector ~ is not supported on iOS 9 when used with the :hover or :checked pseudo class selectors.

A lot of interactive emails use pseudo classes to check whether or not something has happened in an email and style elements appropriately depending on the state. However, this bug will cause formerly interactive emails to be static.

Luckily, there’s a fix! Simply replace the general sibling selector ~ with the adjacent sibling selector +. Although not as flexible as the less-specific general sibling selector, it achieves the same results.

5. USE TABLE-BASED LAYOUTS

In September 2015, Microsoft launched the latest version of their Outlook client—Outlook 2016. Unfortunately, it hasn’t changed much from its predecessors. Like Outlook 2007, 2010, and 2013, Outlook 2016 renders emails using Microsoft Word, which has poor support for HTML and CSS and has a ton of frustrating quirks.

More recent versions of Outlook (2007-2016) have poor support for HTML and CSS and include a number of quirks to keep in mind:

• No support for background images in divs and table cells
• No support for CSS float or position
• No support for text shadow
• Poor support for padding and margin
• Poor support for CSS width and height
• Problems with nested elements background colors

Due to its lack of support for many CSS properties, table-based layouts are a necessity for optimization in Outlook 2016. You can also use conditional CSS to target Outlook 2016 specifically.

6. USE MOBILE-FRIENDLY ELEMENTS

With 55% of email opens happening on mobile devices, it’s more crucial than ever to have a mobile email strategy in place. While using responsive design is a great option, you must also use mobile-friendly elements in cases where media queries are not supported.

For example, neither AOL’s Alto Mail app nor the Universal Outlook app, both of which were introduced in 2015, support media queries.

Take advantage of large text, touch-friendly buttons, and a single-column design to provide your subscribers with the best experience possible.

7. USE OPEN DATA TO MAKE DESIGN DECISIONS

While looking at industry-wide email open trends is a great indicator of adoption of certain email clients, it’s your audience that matters. It’s more important than ever to look at where your audience is opening their email and adjust your designs accordingly.

For example, we saw a 22% increase in iPhone opens in 2015, which now accounts for 33% of total email opens. If you’re seeing something similar in your own audience, you can use that data to inform your design decisions. We know that iOS, iPhone’s operating system, has excellent support for HTML and CSS, so you can safely use advanced techniques like HTML5 video backgrounds in our campaigns.

The key is understanding your audience. With Email Analytics, you’ll get the data you need to optimize your designs. Sign up for a free 14 day trial today. No credit card required.

GET THE 2016 STATE OF EMAIL REPORT

Want even more information and actionable takeaways? Get up-to-date on the latest email updates and advances by downloading the free report today.

Get the 2016 State of Email Report →

The post 7 Design Tips for Building Successful Emails in 2016 appeared first on Litmus Blog.

Support emails…we know, we know, they don’t sound very glamorous. Using email beyond the standard promotional or transactional function doesn’t always garner a lot of attention. However, often overlooked support emails are one of the best ways to build relationships and engage your customers.

The benefits of using email for support

While we also offer phone, live chat, and Twitter support here at Litmus, email is what works best for us. Yes, we really love email!

When it comes to supporting issues within the app, we find it’s the quickest way to gather all of the necessary and relevant information, document the issue, and escalate it to our development team.

Outside of the typical issue and bug reports, we also use support emails to build relationships with our customers, facilitate interactions, gain product suggestions, and build brand personality. It’s also an opportunity to showcase features to our users that they may not have been aware of.

For those reasons and more, we recently transitioned our Customer Support team into our Customer Success team. We’re more than support—and email plays a huge role in making that clear to our customers. Here’s how:

Day-to-day support interactions

Use a consistent voice and style

Numerous members of the Litmus team are customer-facing, so having a cohesive style and voice is crucial. The tone of the Litmus voice is casual because we want you to feel like you’re talking to a friend, not a robot.

Keep it timely

Nobody likes receiving an automated response with a ticket number, followed by a stiff, impersonal response weeks later. We answer 86% of all customer emails within 6 hours. We want our customers to know that if something is bugging them, it’s on our minds, too!

Use plain text emails

In addition to making sure all of our emails have a “Litmusy” voice, the design of our daily emails is consistent as well. There’s nothing fancy to them. In fact, they’re not designed at all. We use plain text to ensure that our emails will render across all platforms. This makes us and our message accessible to our customers.

Be helpful, very helpful

Day-to-day support emails also give you an opportunity to introduce your users to all the tools and benefits that your product provides. For example, while reviewing a customer’s email, you may notice that they aren’t using all of the features available in their account. This is the perfect opportunity to link them to a quick tutorial, or even give them temporary access to a feature that requires an upgrade. Every interaction by email is an opportunity to educate your users, and make them aware of tools they may not be utilizing.

Gain feedback and product ideas

Litmus is not just a product, it’s a team of awesome people, too. We’re approachable, resourceful, and helpful—and we’re able to show that via email. The more we convey that to our customers, the more comfortable they are coming to us with their feedback, ideas, and issues.

Every support email gives us the opportunity to interact with our customers and gain their invaluable feedback.

Your customers are your best resource, and for this reason the support team can really help guide product development. Outside of helping our team to identify issues and bugs, users pass along a variety of feedback every day that motivates us to improve our customer experience.

Specific to Litmus, this includes notifying us of changes in the email marketing industry. Users help us track down changes in email clients as soon as they happen, and rendering issues when a new version is released.

They’re also a huge resource for UX/UI improvements. In fact, many of the changes made in our recent app updates came from daily interactions with our customers via email.

Even after the app update launched, our development team was poring over email feedback and making constant tweaks and adjustments to the platform. The result was a clean, efficient, and powerful design that improved workflows and made email better.

Triggered support emails

In addition to our daily support emails, we have several triggered emails that are sent to customers at various stages of their Litmus subscription. One of the emails is sent out if a customer decides not to activate their subscription on Litmus. This helps us to understand why the user decided against upgrading their account.

Another triggered support email that we have is a check-in note a few weeks after a customer has signed up. We ask how things are going, and make sure any questions the customer has get answered.

And, like our day-to-day emails, we keep the design of these triggered emails very simple and use plain text. This helps to keep them casual and conversational, and ensure they are accessible regardless of whether our customers are reading on desktop, mobile, or webmail.

Triggered emails give us yet another opportunity to interact with our users. While we have a lot of customers that choose to start a conversation by emailing our support inbox, we also know it’s important for us to reach out as well. It’s a two-way street and we want to make sure we are doing everything we can to improve our user experience.

Cancellation emails

Whenever a customer decides to cancel their Litmus subscription, we ask them to provide feedback within the app. Users can choose from a few pre-filled reasons for cancelling, or they can opt to write their own. Each response creates an email that is sent into support.

While these emails can be tough to read sometimes (hey, no one likes being broken up with!), they provide us with invaluable feedback. Whether it’s an issue with the product, UI/UX, billing, or customer service, they give us advice on where we need to improve.

They also give us a second chance to redeem ourselves. For example, if they cancelled because they thought we were lacking a feature that we actually had—we can make them aware of that tool.

Or, maybe they were on a lower level plan and didn’t realize one of our upgraded plans had the feature they were looking for. This is the perfect opportunity to let them try the upgraded feature.

While breakups are never easy, they’re a great learning experience—and, hey, if you’re lucky, you may just get a second chance!

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The post How Support Teams Can Use Email to Engage Customers appeared first on Litmus Blog.