Founded in 1988, United Internet AG is one of Germany’s leading ISPs, and the parent company of several webmail clients. Between all their services, they have over 47 million customer accounts.

One of United Internet’s email clients is GMX, which was founded in 1997. GMX is owned by Global Mail Exchange, a subsidiary of United Internet AG, and has more than 19 million users. It offers a free webmail client, GMX Freemail, which, much like AOL Mail and Gmail, is advertising-supported. It also offers paid options—TopMail and ProMail—which offer additional storage and email addresses for members residing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

WEB.DE, founded in 1995, is another email client provided by United Internet. It has 15 million users, and also offers a free, advertising-supported webmail client, WEB.DE Freemail. It also offers professional, fee-based solutions for those with larger email needs.

Nearly 54% of emails in Germany are opened in GMX or WEB.DE. If you’re based in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland (or one of your offices is), or you’re emailing subscribers based in those countries, then you should be aware of how your emails display in these clients—and if they’ll even reach the inbox.

A LOOK AT THE CLIENTS + THEIR TOOLS

Mobile apps + flexible access

Both GMX and WEB.DE make it easy to access email anywhere, on any device. Users can check email via the webmail client and POP3/IMAP. In addition, both clients offer iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps.

Many email addresses, one app

GMX Freemail users are granted two email addresses with the domain of @gmx.de (Germany), @gmx.at (Austria), @gmx.ch (Switzerland), or @gmx.net. Both email addresses can be hooked up within one interface, so users can access all of their mail—personal and business—within one app.

For those with paying GMX ProMail and TopMail accounts, they are granted more email addresses, as well as a wider array of domains to choose from.

WEB.DE users are granted one email address with the @web.de domain. There are premium services for users that need more addresses.

Email actions in the browser

GMX and WEB.DE both offer MailCheck services for no additional cost. MailCheck is a browser add-on that allows users to see the number of unread messages in their inbox. It also gives users the ability to take action directly from within their browser—they can write emails, refresh their inbox, view their media center, and check their calendar. MailCheck also allows for desktop notifications.

In addition, when MailCheck is set up, the mail storage capacity in both GMX and WEB.DE Freemail increase.

YOUR EMAIL IN GMX + WEB.DE

Now let’s get to the good stuff—how do your emails display in these clients?

Optimize your emails in GMX + WEB.DE Use Litmus Email Analytics to see if your subscribers open in GMX and WEB.DE and get Instant Previews in those clients with Litmus. Try Litmus free →

THE INBOX VIEW

GMX

GMX automatically sorts emails into five categories: Favorites, Inbox, Read, Spam, Sent, and Draft. When a user logs in, they are automatically taken to the Inbox folder.

The Inbox folder includes all emails that pass through the GMX spam filter, as well as advertisements. Advertisements are greyed out, and display a logo next to their sender name. Advertisements can be removed from the inbox by clicking on the “X” icon next to the sender name (see “Keuchenportal.de” example above).

If a user clicks on an advertisement, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of the email:

This disclaimer clarifies that this is an advertisement, and that user data will not be passed on to the advertiser.

In addition:

• Symbols in the subject line are supported
• Preview text is not displayed

Since preview text isn’t supported, the sender name and subject line will be crucial for encouraging subscribers to open. Use a recognizable, trustworthy from name, and an optimized subject line.

WEB.DE

WEB.DE sorts emails into eight categories: Unread, Favorites, Friends & Acquaintances, Unknown, Trash, Spam, Sent, and Drafts. When a user logs in, they are automatically placed in their Friends & Acquaintances folder.

Emails in this folder include emails from WEB.DE, as well as those in the user’s address book, and senders they frequently interact with.

Like GMX, WEB.DE also supports symbols in the inbox.

WEB.DE has advertisements in the inbox, but rather than showing the advertiser’s icon, they use their own logo to distinguish ads from other messages in the inbox.

In the example above, the advertisement is for Skoda, a car manufacturer. The subject line translates to “WEB.DE presents Skoda.” Similar to GMX, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of each advertisement.

HOW DO GMX and WEB.DE DISPLAY YOUR EMAILS?

Similar to AOL Mail, GMX and WEB.DE show emails in an iframe, rather than embedding them. This maintains your email’s original code, rather than reformatting it inline—and it leads to great rendering capabilities.

Email in GMX

Email in WEB.DE

Images automatically on

Both GMX and WEB.DE display images by default in the inbox. However, optimizing for image blocking for other email clients is always a great idea. Try using HTML text, ALT text, and bulletproof buttons.

However, all messages in the Spam folder have images disabled. And, when this is the case, images are collapsed and ALT text is not supported.

Images enabled in GMX

Images blocked in GMX

Support for Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs are a great way to add interactive visuals to your designs. Luckily, both GMX and WEB.DE support animated GIFs, so feel free to get creative.

However, not all email clients support animated GIFs. Instead, they will show the first frame of the animation. To overcome this, ensure vital information—perhaps a call-to-action, offer, or headline—is included in the first frame of your GIF.

Lack of advanced HTML and CSS support

While GMX and WEB.DE have great support for HTML and CSS basics, they lack support for advanced techniques. This isn’t unexpected—most webmail clients have similar shortcomings.

For example, neither GMX nor WEB.DE support HTML5 video. If you’re using these types of advanced techniques, be sure to have proper fallbacks in place.

In addition, we noticed during testing that neither client supports border-radius. This attribute is often used to add rounded corners to call-to-action (CTA) buttons, like the one below:

GMX and WEB.DE do not support border radius

It’s a subtle change compared to email clients where where border-radius is supported:

Gmail supports border-radius

Lack of support for border-radius won’t affect the functionality of your CTAs.

SPAM FILTERS, SECURITY & DELIVERABILITY

Germany is known for its strict spam laws, and GMX and WEB.DE pride themselves on their high security and privacy standards. Both have a multi-level spam filter, which detects unsolicited emails and moves them to the Spam folder.

The spam filters perform tasks like:

• Distinguishing reputable emails from unsolicited bulk emails based on checksum methods.
• Analyzing emails for technical properties and errors that are typical of spam.
• Checking emails for fake sender addresses (i.e. ensuring the email was sent from the server responsible for the domain).
• Comparing emails with internal and external lists (i.e. IP addresses of servers known for sending spam or URLs that occur in known spam e-mails).

In addition, there is also a personal spam filter in these clients. When a user personally marks an email as “Spam” or “Not Spam,” future emails from those senders will be classified in the correct folder.

“Email Made in Germany”

In an effort to promote German email providers as the most secure in the world, four of United Internet’s brands—GMX, WEB.DE, Telekom, and freenet—joined together to implement new security standards.

The result of this initiative—“Email Made in Germany”—was launched in August 2013. The program ensures that email traveling between its email servers never leave local servers, which are all based in Germany. Email Made in Germany guarantees that all emails are transmitted with SSL encryption and protected against access from third parties.

Secure senders are marked with an “Email Made in Germany” seal.

Source: Email Made in Germany

It should be noted that this program is only effective for emails being transferred between GMX, WEB.DE, Telekom, and freenet. If a user from within the network emails a user with a Gmail account, that email will not be encrypted. Users will be notified if they are emailing to an address that does not fall under the program’s protection.

Trusted Dialog

Founded in 2009 by email clients like WEB.DE, GMX, 1 & 1, freenet, and T-Online, Trusted Dialog is an initiative that aims to protect their users from spam.

Trusted Dialog verifies the authenticity of the sender’s emails through DKIM, ensuring that the sender is who they say they are. After proof of authenticity has been provided, the sender gets the Trusted Dialog seal and their logo displayed in the inbox.

Thanks to the seal and logo, users can easily identify trustworthy emails in their inboxes. Many Trusted Dialog brands have seen an increase in opens and clicks as a result of the increased trust with their subscribers.

Other benefits of being a Trusted Dialog brand include:

• Direct delivery to the inbox—not the spam folder. In GMX, emails are delivered straight to the inbox, whereas in WEB.DE messages are delivered to the Friends & Acquaintances folder.
• Video content will play within the inbox. Trusted Dialog brands can include video within an iframe, which will display in WEB.DE, GMX, 1 & 1, freenet, and T-Online.

In addition, when a user views an email from a Trusted Dialog brand, the email is the focus of the screen—advertisements are removed.

Conversely, for non-Trusted Dialog brands, advertisements are viewable in the sidebar:

OPTIMIZE YOUR EMAILS GMX AND WEB.DE

Use Litmus Email Analytics to see if your subscribers open in GMX and WEB.DE and get Instant Previews in those clients with Litmus.

Rest assured that your designs look great regardless of where your subscribers are opening.

Try Litmus free →

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The post The Ultimate Guide to GMX and Web.de: How do they display your emails? appeared first on Litmus Blog.

The email landscape is constantly changing. Between the introduction of new email apps and deliverability updates, email marketing has never presented more challenges—or opportunities. As an email marketer focused on success, it’s crucial to stay on top of every new development.

In our 2016 State of Email Report, we analyze the biggest email developments and provide tons of actionable tips and advice to keep you on top of your game.

Get your free report →

Here’s a sneak peek of some of the takeaways you’ll find inside.

Send relevant emails

In January 2015, Microsoft launched Outlook for Android and iOS phones and tablets. The Outlook app splits messages into two groups: Focused and Other.

With the organization of emails into Focused and Other, subscribers will find it even easier to
pass up marketing emails. Sending relevant, useful, and timely messages may be the only way around it. Relevant content engages subscribers, building trust in your brand and the emails you send. Over time, subscribers receiving valuable content scan their inboxes looking for messages from brands they trust.

And, if you’re sending relevant emails and have highly-engaged subscribers, then you may find your emails landing in the coveted Focus group. In contrast, marketers who aren’t sending relevant messaging might find that their emails are more easily ignored in the Other group.

Keep an eye on your iOS engagement rates

In September 2015, Apple released the latest version of their mobile operating system, iOS 9. The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus feature 3D Touch, which adds pressure sensitivity to the latest iPhones and introduces two new interactions: peek and pop.

When scrolling through the inbox, users can now use a light press to “peek” at an email, which opens the email itself in a modal window. Using that same touch, they can then press harder to “pop” into the email itself and see the entire email, just like opening it normally.

Since “peeking” at an email loads the images contained within, peeks will count as opened emails. However, even though opens are registered, engagement could easily drop for campaigns if subscribers are just “peeking” at—and not reading—your campaigns. If you’re seeing your engagement rates dropping, consider revamping your content, optimizing your inbox view, and ensuring your messages are mobile-friendly.

Make your email preference center more visible + accessible

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, since 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.

Often times, a subscriber would be happy to continue receiving emails if only they could receive messages less often or on different topics. Many opt-out processes are now managed in preference centers, but as more subscribers rely on ISP-provided opt-out methods, marketers can’t use their preference centers as a last resort anymore.

Be proactive with your preference centers. Key moments in the subscriber lifecycle are the perfect time to get your subscribers to update their preferences.

Use Gmail Postmaster Tools to your advantage

In July 2015, Google launched Gmail Postmaster Tools, which helps “qualified high-volume senders analyze their email, including data on delivery errors, spam reports, and reputation.” The goal of this tool is simple: get wanted mail to the inbox and put spam where it belongs.

Gmail Postmaster Tools gives email marketers a major advantage by allowing them to check on their email performance to monitor trends over time and ensure that their messages are hitting their subscribers’ inboxes. This gives marketers insights that they’ve never had before, and should be taken advantage of immediately.

To set up the Gmail Postmaster Tools, you have to add a CNAME or TXT DNS record. Google will then test these records on a recurring basis to verify ownership.

Once you’re up and running, you can analyze each dashboard to look for key trends that are negatively or positively impacting your deliverability. The Delivery Errors Dashboard is particularly useful—you’ll gain insights into exactly why your email was rejected, such as the email content is possibly spammy or the sending IP address has a low reputation.

GET MORE TIPS IN 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 2016 State of Email Report: The Email Marketer’s Guide to Creating Successful Campaigns appeared first on Litmus Blog.

“It’s ok, we have good open and click through rates.”

Did your eyes roll a little when reading that line? How many times have you had a client say that to you when you asked about their email metrics? While helpful, these two metrics rarely give a well-rounded portrait of how subscribers are interacting with their emails (and if they are actually engaged at all!).

As part of Digital Agency Day, we hosted a live webinar that covered the “other metrics” that your team should be looking at to optimize emails for your clients.

Didn’t have a chance to make it to the webinar? No worries! We recorded the whole thing.

View slides on SlideShare →

There were so many great questions during the webinar. We didn’t have a chance to get to them all, but have answered them all here on the blog. Have any additional questions? Leave them in the comments.

Why do opens and clicks only give a limited portrait of subscriber engagement?

While open and click rates are a great way to see what subject lines and preview text are getting the most opens, and what links are getting the most clicks, they don’t provide a deeper understanding of subscriber interactions. How long were they engaged with your client’s email? Did they forward it to anyone? Opens and clicks lack data like these insights.

What other metrics should we look at when building email campaigns for our clients?

Engagement rates (or time spent on email)

Engagement time is incredibly important to review in parallel to your client’s open rates. Are your client’s subscribers even reading their emails, or simply glancing and deleting them?

In the webinar, I gave the example of why I am a “marketer’s worst nightmare.” I am one of those dreaded folks who opens an email to get it out of their open count on their mobile device, but barely bothers to actually read the mailing. And, I am not the only subscriber to do this! While it counts as an open, I’m not actually engaging with the email at all.

By using time on spent on email, you can understand the divide between the real “Readers,” “Skim Readers,” and “Glance and Deleters” (this is how we actually break it down in Litmus Email Analytics).

With this data in hand you can send content-rich newsletters to your clients most engaged subscribers. Are you seeing the same subscribers consistently skipping over your client’s emails? Maybe it’s time to remove them from your client’s main mailing list and add them to a “disengaged” list—try a win-back campaign!

Email client and device open data

Understanding the different email apps and programs your client’s subscribers are using will help you create consistent, well-performing messages. Do they have a high percentage of mobile opens? Are a lot of their subscribers using Outlook 2010? This information can help guide both strategic and design decisions for your client’s email program.

For example, if your clients are seeing a high percentage of opens on mobile devices, you might want to consider a scalable, fluid, or responsive design (we cover these approaches in the webinar!). Or use the data to send targeted messages to smartphone users, like announcing a new mobile app.

Geolocation data

With geolocation data, you can pinpoint exactly where your client’s subscribers are when they read their email.

Are your client’s subscribers mostly in Europe? Are they mostly in Europe opening on Apple devices in the mornings? Looking at these metrics can have a profound influence on your send time, what platforms you tailor your content for, the language of the email, and even the type of content that they see.

For example, here at Litmus, we used geolocation data to target our announcement email for The Email Design Conference. West coast subscribers received info about our San Francisco conference, east coast subscribers about our Boston conference, and European subscribers about our London conference. These geo-targeted emails saw an average of 209% increase in opens over the general email that included information about all three locations.

Forwards and prints

Use forward and print data to note trends with email sharing and other evangelist behaviors. Consider rewarding frequent forwarders by creating a loyalty program. Print and forward activity can also help identify high-performing or “viral” content in your client’s email program, providing another data point outside of opens and clicks.

Is there a one-size-fits-all solution for optimizing designs across all the different email apps and devices?

The short answer is no. However, there is a silver lining! You don’t have to optimize your designs for every email app—you only have to focus on the ones that the majority of your client’s subscribers are using.

There is a very wide variety of email clients and apps that your client’s subscribers could be using to view their emails. Between desktop, mobile, and webmail clients—plus different versions of those clients, as well as numerous email apps—it can seem as though the list of places your client’s subscribers are viewing their emails is endless.

In order to stay sane it’s probably not realistic to test in every possible combination. As a result, knowing where your client’s audience is opening your emails is key to narrowing down which programs and apps you should test in. It not only saves you time, but ensures that your client’s email will render well in all of the necessary environments.

For example, if only a minor portion of your client’s audience is using Outlook—which can be difficult to design for—then you shouldn’t waste too much time optimizing your emails in that client.

Should we make it easy for our client’s subscribers to unsubscribe? Or is that email marketing suicide?

We always recommend making it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe. Not only is an unsubscribe link necessary under spam laws, but if it’s missing or inaccessible, it can greatly affect your client’s overall sending reputation.

If subscribers can’t easily spot an opt-out link, then they make block the message, or mark it as spam. While unsubscribes aren’t ideal, it’s better than getting a block or spam complaint.

How can Litmus help agencies and teams building emails for clients?

For starters, Litmus offers access to all of the metrics mentioned—engagement rates, email client device open data, print and forward tracking, and geolocation data. We provide these metrics at an aggregate level, as well as an individual-level. With Email Analytics you simply add a small tracking code to your client’s campaigns, and all of the deep-data reports are generated for you.

We also offer a plan that was built specifically for agencies. Our Unlimited plan allows your team to add as many users and use as many Email Analytics tracking codes as needed. We just charge based on usage.

Plus, this is the only plan that comes with subaccounts, as well as Litmus accounts that you can offer or resell to your client.

Want more information about our Unlimited plan? Shoot me a note.

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The post Data You Should Be Using to Optimize Your Clients’ Campaigns: Webinar Q&A appeared first on Litmus Blog.

Your customers leave little data clues behind them wherever they go. In fact, we collectively create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, according to IBM—which means that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

That’s a lot of breadcrumbs to follow!

The Big Data movement is all about sorting through all these bits of data—discarding the ones that are meaningless noise, putting aside the ones that don’t tell us anything actionable, and creating plans and campaigns based the ones that yield true customer insights.

Matt Laudato, Senior Manager of Big Data Analytics at Constant Contact, has been sorting through the piles of data generated by the email service provider’s customers and has uncovered lots of interesting takeaways. I had the opportunity to sit down with Matt at The Email Design Conference and talk about what he and his team have learned and how marketers can uncover Big Data insights of their own.

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

It started with simple questions. And it started with the fact that we knew we had gold. We knew we had a lot of interesting data. We also knew we weren’t leveraging it. We weren’t using it to the advantage of our customers. And my bias is always if you do the right thing for the customer, they will drag you along and make your business successful as well. And so I knew that we weren’t doing the best for our business.

Small Wins

It’s amazing what happens when you get to a small win. The first small wins that we were able to talk about around the company—and best time to send was certainly one of them—really just opened up the eyes of a lot of folks, a lot of stakeholders who I was asking for things like more budget, for example, and they realized that we actually had something here.

So it was small steps, focused questions, making sure that the data was sound and that we believed in our analysis. And it’s really snowballed from then.

‘The Super Fan’

You always hear that there’s a small group of people that influence. Well, we found that in spades. We found that there’s a very small group, about 10% of the people that open emails, are responsible for half of your opens. We found that 10% of the folks that you have on your list are responsible for almost half of your clicks.

So just that the notion that on something as big as an email list there was this small cluster of people that were the real influencers—that was a real eye opener.

Focus on Fewer Links

People are very interested in the click studies that we did. Specifically, there’s two competing results, which is that the more links you put in an email, the higher your click rate. This doesn’t mean that you should put a couple of hundred links in your email though.

We also found that the more links you put into an e-mail, the less effective each link is. If you look deeper at it—and that’s really the power of what we’re doing—you find that, you know what? It really does make sense to keep the number of links small. You’re going to get more effective communications there. You’re going to get people to focus on the things that are important.

Behind the Number

I think people go wrong by simply looking at the number and forgetting that there’s somebody behind that number who wants to be made to feel special. And that really ties into some of the things we were talking about as to, can you segment people? Can you find the right group to put people in so that they really do feel special? They’re getting a communication from you that makes them feel like they’re not just one of the many sheep grazing on the hill, but they’re somebody who’s special and important.

So I always like to go behind the number and remind myself, every day, that there’s somebody there that is responding and they’re important, and I have to treat them as such.

More Expert Videos

• Achieving Better Performance with Email Segmentation & Personalization [Video]
• 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 Gaining Email Marketing Insights from Big Data [Video] appeared first on Litmus Blog.

Nearly 54% of emails in Germany are opened in GMX or WEB.DE. If you’re based in Germany or its surrounding regions, or you’re emailing subscribers based in that area, then understanding how your emails display in those clients is critical.

But, where are these webmail users opening their emails? Are they using the client’s web interface, or are they opening on a mobile browser?

Users of free web-based email services, like GMX and WEB.DE, typically have IMAP access to their messages, making their email accessible from virtually any email client they choose.

Breaking down GMX and WEB.DE opens will help you identify optimization efforts in those clients. For example, if the majority of your WEB.DE opens are occurring in iOS or Apple Mail, which both have great support for HTML and CSS, then you don’t have as much to worry about. However, if they’re opening in Gmail, then inlining your CSS is a must.

To dive deep into GMX and WEB.DE opens, we analyzed over 1.2 million opens from webmail accounts to examine the behavior and preferences of their users.

Check out a high-res version of the infographic, or read the transcription below.

Where do GMX and WEB.DE users open email?

Founded in 1988, United Internet AG is one of Germany’s leading ISPs, and the parent company of numerous webmail clients. Two of United Internet’s most popular clients—GMX and WEB.DE—offer free webmail services.

Users of free webmail services, like GMX or WEB.DE, can choose to view email messages in a browser, using a smartphone or tablet, or even in a desktop mail client like Apple Mail or Microsoft’s Outlook. So, with all of these choices, where are these German webmail users opening their email?

GMX

39% of GMX users read email on mobile devices. The majority of these mobile opens—79%—take place on iPhone and iPad, while 21% occur on Android devices.

Popular mail clients for GMX users

• GMX webmail: 33%
• Apple iPhone: 23%
• Apple Mail: 9%
• Google Android: 8%
• Outlook: 8%

Breakdown by environment

• 23% of GMX users open on desktop
• 39% of GMX users open on mobile
• 38% of GMX users open in a browser

GMX opens on desktop

Emails opened by GMX accounts on desktop clients only account for 23% of total GMX opens—the majority of which is in Apple Mail or Outlook.

• Apple Mail: 38%
• Outlook: 35%
• Other: 27%

GMX opens on mobile

The majority of emails opened on GMX accounts occur in mobile devices, with the Apple iPhone being the most popular device.

• Apple iPhone: 61%
• Google Android: 21%
• Apple iPad: 18%

GMX opens in a browser

87% of GMX webmail opens—and 33% of total GMX opens—take place in their web interface.

• GMX webmail: 87%
• Windows Live Mail: 6%
• Gmail: 6%
• Outlook.com: 1%

WEB.DE

The majority of WEB.DE users—57%—are reading their emails in the provider’s browser interface. The Apple iPhone and Apple Mail are also popular among WEB.DE users.

Popular mail clients for WEB.DE users

• WEB.DE webmail: 57%
• Apple iPhone: 16%
• Apple Mail: 6%
• Apple iPad: 5%
• Google Android: 5%

Breakdown by environment

• 13% of WEB.DE users open on desktop
• 26% of WEB.DE users open on mobile
• 61% of WEB.DE users open in a browser

WEB.DE opens on desktop

Similar to GMX, the majority of WEB.DE users who open on desktop use Apple Mail.

• Apple Mail: 46%
• Outlook: 29%
• Other: 25%

WEB.DE opens on mobile

26% of WEB.DE users open their email on mobile devices. 81% of these mobile opens occur on Apple iPhone or iPhone.

• Apple iPhone: 61%
• Apple iPad: 20%
• Google Android: 19%

WEB.DE opens in a browser

A whopping 93% of WEB.DE webmail opens occur in the WEB.DE web interface.

• WEB.DE webmail: 93%
• Gmail: 4%
• Windows Live Mail: 2%
• GMX webmail: 1%

*Data in this infographic is based on opens from Litmus Email Analytics. A random sample of over 1.2 million web-based email opens between May and April 2015 formed the basis of the analysis. Some email clients and mobile devices may be over- or under-represented due to image blocking.

OPTIMIZE YOUR EMAILS FOR GMX AND WEB.DE

Use Litmus Email Analytics to see if your subscribers open in GMX and WEB.DE and get Instant Previews in those clients with Litmus.

Rest assured that your designs look great regardless of where your subscribers are opening.

Try Litmus free →

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As part of the research that went into his 2012 bestseller To Sell Is Human, author and speaker Daniel Pink surveyed people on the first words that came to mind when they heard “sales” or “selling.”

Among the 25 most frequently used adjectives or interjections were words like “pushy,” “sleazy,” “manipulative,” “annoying,” “ugh,” and “yuck.” (I could go on, but you get the idea.)

This research validates some of the experiences many people have with salesmen.

But it also has an unexpected effect on marketers and salespeople, as many have become fearful of coming across as too “salesy” in their efforts. They’ve developed defense mechanisms in the form of a more passive sales approach, avoiding words or situations they fear people will associate with a sales pitch, resulting in unfavorable responses.

Other marketers and salespeople hold such findings with little to no regard. They approach their job with the level of authority they feel is needed to persuade and influence others to buy.

As Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Translation: I know what’s better for my customers than they do. Of course, this worked for Ford, but does it actually work for most communicators?

Not quite. As we’ll learn, most people are turned off by the dominant sales pitch. But does that mean they’re turned off by sales in general, or is there a better approach to take in our email campaigns?

How do people really feel about sales?

People aren’t actually afraid of being sold to. Instead, they don’t like a sales pitch that takes a dominant approach for a product or service that doesn’t align with their needs and interests.

In his book Give and Take, author Adam Grant details research that suggests two fundamental paths of influence: dominance and prestige.

A sales pitch relying on dominance uses powerful communication—a method of selling in which, according to Grant, the communicator aims to “claim as much value as possible by striving to be superior to others. They speak forcefully, raise their voices to assert authority, express certainty to project confidence, promote their accomplishments, and sell with conviction and pride.”

These types of pitches tend to be more brand-centric, wherein you’ll read lots of “I’s” and “We’s” and very little about you as the customer or subscriber.

Methods which are commonly used to pitch via email. In fact, you may find them in your inbox fairly often. (Gmail users: Check your promotions tab.)

Many times, the sender practicing powerful communication attempts to influence you with their credentials, like this:

If you couldn’t get through more than a few lines of that email, believe me, I don’t blame you.

Other times, the sender wastes no time (or all of it, depending how you look at it) jumping right to the pitch.

This salesperson, writing on behalf of the company, opened with a textbook power word in describing his company as a “leading” provider. After that, he jumped right into the pitch with no regard for the recipient.

Not ironically, this email was marked as spam and had to be fished out of a folder with many other messages just like it. Not only are these emails less effective at gaining influence, they’re apt to be marked as spam and go unseen by your audience.

These are the kinds of sales pitches that drive survey results like the ones we saw in To Sell Is Human. The more you attempt to dominate an audience, the more they resist.

As Grant writes in Give and Take, “Even with a receptive audience, dominance is a zero-sum game: the more power I have, the less you have.”

In other words, the more you try to secure dominance, the higher the risk you run of losing influence.

Powerless communication

Rather than relying on dominance through powerful communication to influence an audience, a sales pitch focused on prestige aims to earn respect and admiration through what’s called powerless communication.

With powerless communication, marketers speak less assertively, express doubt, ask questions, and rely on advice from others. They’re not afraid to convey vulnerability.

While it seems counterintuitive, expressing vulnerability instead of certainty is more effective when it comes to influencing others. Empathy is a powerful selling tool.

Whereas powerful communication is more brand-centric, powerless communication is all about being customer or subscriber-centric. In other words, it’s about you. “Tell us what you think”, “what are some ways we can improve your experience?” “Here is what others are saying.”

Note there are no assumptions being made. Powerless communication is about conveying that you don’t know it all.

Here are just some of the ways that brands use powerless communication to sell more effectively.

Tentative talk

While marketers and salespeople aiming for dominance use powerful speech, those looking to secure prestige use powerless speech.

Grant classifies them as follows:

• Hesitations: “well,” “um,” uh,” “you know”
• Hedges: “kinda,” “sorta,” “maybe,” “probably,” “I think”
• Disclaimers: “this may be a bad idea, but”
• Tag questions: “that’s interesting, isn’t it?” or “that’s a good idea, right?”
• Intensifiers: “really,” “very,” “quite”

Tentative speech suggests that, as the communicator, you’re willing to take someone else’s opinion into consideration. That you’re willing to defer, negotiate, or even rely on them for the answer.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Rather than using powerful communication to express certainty, Boombox—an app for online publishers—uses powerless communication to create influence instead.

There are no credentials, product specs, or power words. In fact, the marketers at Boombox relied on a case study to sell their product, using hedges and disclaimers to defer the message.

Asking Questions

Asking questions shows people that you care enough about their interests to continue learning about them. Sure, the end goal is for brands to sell product, but when they do so with the customer’s best interests in mind, people aren’t afraid of being sold to.

Take this email I received from The North Face, as an example:

Besides the noticeable absence of any discernable product pitch, The North Face is using powerless communication to ask for my outdoor interests in order to provide a more personalized experience moving forward.

Not only are questions effective at deflecting the focus to the subscriber, they’re also effective drivers of action. In Give and Take, Grant refers to research conducted by American psychologist Elliot Aronson, where it was learned that by asking people questions regarding behavior, they were then more likely to exhibit said behavior.

For example, if you ask someone if they’re planning to vote, you’ve just increased the odds that they will actually vote by 41 percent. Research also shows that if you ask someone if they plan on buying a new computer in the next six months, they will be 18 percent more likely to do so.

But why?

As Grant notes, “when I ask if you’re planning to vote, you don’t feel like I’m trying to influence you. It’s an innocent query, and instead of resisting my influence, you reflect on it. This doesn’t feel like I’m persuading you. You’ve been convinced by someone you already like and trust: yourself.”

Don’t be afraid of selling

Keep in mind that research that positions sales unfavorably consists mainly of experiences with sleazy and dominant pitches riddled with powerful communication techniques.

No matter what you’ve heard, don’t be afraid of selling to others via email.

The favorable experiences aren’t accounted for in such research. This is where, as email professionals, your opportunity lies.

Become part of the small percentage of sales emails that utilizes powerless communication, expresses uncertainty, and deflects the focus on the customer.

In other words, write emails that sell.

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The post How to Write Emails That Sell: An Analysis of Influential Language appeared first on Litmus Blog.

About a month ago, a friend and fellow Boston marketer and I got into a discussion about the merits of customer marketing, and more specifically, how email plays a role.

Casey Hogan was frustrated, as she had just received her tenth—tenth!—upsell email from a brand that she had been using for four years.

Obviously annoyed, she took to Twitter in search of empathy.

CX in need of upgrade:
1 Use code for 1st X free ✔️
2 Refer friends, get $ ✔️
3 Refer friends, get $ …✔️
4 Refer friends, get $ …..

— Casey Hogan (@hogan) December 10, 2015

Asked by another user to clarify, she went on:

@netspencer Not a great experience for a long time user.

— Casey Hogan (@hogan) December 10, 2015

I added my .02 cents…

@hogan @netspencer Hate when email is used exclusively as leverage in a relationship rather than a relationship itself : (

— John Bonini (@Bonini84) December 11, 2015

…and the inspiration for this post was born.

For Hogan, formerly a marketer at Drift and Drizly, the customer experience is something of great personal meaning. And like anything else worth analogizing, she related her experience to dating:

“Getting a subscriber is just like getting someone’s number…Most people don’t want to hear from someone they just met three times a day. I would also guess they don’t want to sporadically hear ‘hey can you set me up with your friends?’ either.”

Conversely, by permission marketing standards, all seems fair. But when we consider how subscribers’ rising expectations has worked to evolve what email spam really is, her frustration comes into focus.

A friend and colleague of mine, Chad White, writes in his book Email Marketing Rules that “Having permission only gets you so far nowadays. Irrelevant and unwanted email is the new spam in the eyes of both consumers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).”

How your customers define email spam

White’s definition above is whiteboard material.

Your customers view any irrelevant or unwanted email as spam. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been a customer or if they’ve given you permission—if your email is repeatedly of little to no relevance to them, it’s spam.

Or, as was the case mentioned earlier, this particular brand was more interested in using Hogan to create new relationships than actually building a relationship with her. As detailed by Hogan, the customer experience looked something like this:

• Use code for first X free
• Refer friends, get $
• Refer friends, get $ ..
• Refer friends, get $ ….
• Refer friends, get $ …..

…and so on. Ten times.

There was obviously no relevance for the user, otherwise she wouldn’t have taken to Twitter to voice her frustrations. But how are brands to define relevance? As White says in Email Marketing Rules, “it’s often discussed in vague, mystical terms.”

In an attempt to lift the veil a bit, I’ve detailed some ways I’ve found effective at ensuring a more relevant experience for subscribers.

Set the right expectations

This section is really about table stakes. If your subscribers aren’t sure of what kinds of communications to expect, you’ve exposed yourself to the risk of being reported as spam, thus hurting your subscriber reputation and any future hopes of landing in the inbox.

So tables stakes or not, it’s important to note here.

Sign up forms and welcome emails are two areas of prime real estate you should use to clearly inform people what they will be receiving from your brand.

If you plan on emailing occasional gated material, let people know in advance of them providing their email address. Whether or not you view additional communications as a value add is irrelevant, both to this principle and to your subscribers.

Let subscribers of any list know ahead of time exactly what they can expect to receive from your brand. Then, most importantly, reduce your messaging to specific lists to the content they expect to receive.

Personalize the subject matter, not the subject

Advances in marketing technology has resulted in a misconception of what personalization really is, and more unfortunately, in marketers abusing the tactics available for achieving faux personalization.

So let’s start with what personalization is not. It’s not:

• Knowing your subscriber’s name, or
• Location
• Company name
• Job title
• Industry, or any other basic demographic information

Personalization is about interests, behavior, and challenges. And while most brands can talk about these characteristics in detail as they pertain to their target audience, many do not tailor the email marketing strategy to communicate the right messages to those who need it most.

Let’s use an example from my own inbox.

I joined the Dollar Shave Club last fall, and right before my first box shipped, I received an email with the subject line, “Your first box is about to ship. Toss more in.”

This was pretty pertinent information for me. Naturally, I opened.

Inside were four product suggestions, including a shave butter I had never tried. I wouldn’t normally purchase shave butter, but at $4.99, I thought, “Why not? One less thing I have to remember at the store.”

Dollar Shave Club knows this about me (and all its users): we value convenience over features. Their razors don’t have 8 blades, a battery, or other gimmicks. It’s just a razor. But they’re delivered to the doorstep every month, for less than we’d pay in the store.

Convenience over features.

This email, from the subject line through the body copy, stayed consistent with this message. That’s personalization. They didn’t need to use my name anywhere in the email. Instead, they know why I buy from them and use this to improve my experience and increase sales.

Now, this was a more general form of personalization. Most automation software enables you to collect more relevant, personal information on your customers and prospects. Not only should you be gathering information around buyer interests, behaviors, preferences, purchase history, and more, you should also be powering your personalization efforts with the insights you glean from it.

User-friendly

Your subscribers are viewing email on a variety of different apps and devices, each with its own rendering quirks that affect the way your email looks and performs.

These are challenges your marketing and design teams face.

From your customer’s standpoint, their challenge is that it may be really hard to read your email on mobile, or that your call-to-action isn’t “clickable” on whichever device they happen to be using. Or maybe it’s that some (or all) the images used are broken, or your links are broken or leading to the wrong page.

Poor user experience leads to frustration, which as shown in the opening, could also lead to declarations of spam.

Utility

While most marketers believe that what they produce and send is of value to their customers, in order to truly be of utility to your customers, you need to think in their terms rather than your own.

Besides using customer intelligence to segment your messaging (discussed earlier), White lists two other ways that email marketers can execute greater value and utility in their strategies: worthwhile and engaging messaging.

Worthwhile

Discounts, deals, and buyer-related information are the number one reason people sign up for emails. This aligns perfectly with David Ogilvy’s summation that, more than anything, people care about saving money.

However, be careful as to use these motivations as a means to take advantage of your customers. As evidenced in the opening, many brands essentially hold their customers ransom with discounts and deals.

In other words, they follow the formula of “if you perform [x], we’ll allow you to save [y].”

Could it also be possible that “performing [x]” aligns with a buyer’s interests while also appealing to their motivation to save money? Sure. But be careful, as there’s a very thin line in appealing to a customer’s motivation and holding them ransom.

Engaging

Chances are a sizeable portion—if not the majority—of your email list is not made up of customers, but prospects—prospects who are not yet ready to buy, but would benefit from educational materials that pertain to their specific needs and challenges.

Here’s where the intelligence you’ve gathered about your prospects—and the subsequent segmentation—come into play in order to deliver the right content to the right people. The “spray and pray” approach is not only less effective, it’s also less valuable to your subscribers.

You may find yourself sending multiple variations of an email, thus spreading your reach across several emails rather than one, in order to achieve this, but you may also find yourself with higher engagement as a result.

Email spam redefined

Your subscribers don’t think in terms of algorithms, they think in terms of relevance.

While ISP algorithms and content filtering are a critical component of ensuring your emails even make it to the inbox, your sender reputation and level of subscriber engagement are even more important when it comes to optimizing for the inbox.

It’s time marketers redefined how they define email spam, because their customers and prospects already have.

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The post The Evolution of Email Spam: Here’s How Your Customers Now Define It appeared first on Litmus Blog.

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 prevents screen readers from announcing elements that are still displayed visually, the role attribute differs in an important way: It does not apply to any nested elements while aria-hidden does — including any children content like text. 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 couple of months 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..

As the spread of the coronavirus evolves into a global health pandemic, many marketers are struggling to understand what the crisis means for their email program. Can you keep sending promotional emails or do you need to adjust your email program? And if so, how?

In this webinar, we shared the email marketing best practices that help you stay connected with your audience in uncertain times, along with some of our favorite examples of brands that have mastered the art of sending empathetic, personal, and helpful emails in times of crisis.

Didn’t have a chance to watch the webinar live? Don’t worry. You can access the full recording below, along with the slides—and read the Q&A below.

Looking for a summary? We’ve put together this quick guide to email marketing during a crisis, highlighting our key takeaways that you can share with your team.

Unsure how to adapt your email marketing during this crisis? You’re not alone.

If you and your team are struggling with what to say and how to say it, you’re not alone. According to our quick webinar poll, only about a quarter of email marketers feel confident they have a solid communication plan in place right now. 49% say they’ve got a plan, but are unsure if it’s the right one. Over a quarter of email marketers say they don’t have a plan in place at all.

Resources to help you navigate these trying times

In addition to the webinar recording, we wanted to share some additional resources you might find helpful:

• PDF Quick Guide: Email Marketing During a Crisis
• 6 Tips on Sending Effective Email During a Crisis
• What We Owe Each Other: Marketing During the Unthinkable
• A Collection of Really Good Emergency Emails
• Why Empathy Wins in Email Marketing
• Beware of Virtue Signaling or Outright Greed in Brand Communications About COVID-19
• Email In the Time of COVID-19: A FAQ Page

Q&A

A big thank you to everyone who chimed in during the webinar with a question! Here’s a recap of our answers to the most popular questions, along with our take on some of the questions we didn’t get to during the live webinar. Have any additional questions? Please leave them in the comments.

Should we pause all promotional emails immediately?

Jason Rodriguez: Maybe, but probably not. The key is to look at those promotional emails and see if they make sense in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. If your promotional emails are sensitive to the situation and provide real value for people dealing with a global pandemic, then keep sending them. They can provide some semblance of normalcy in an otherwise chaotic world.

If they don’t take into account the pandemic and people’s current and evolving needs, then yes, pause them. You can always revisit them in a few months after (hopefully) things have normalized some. As with any email—COVID-19-related or not—ask yourself if it’s something you’d like to receive. Or if it’s something your subscribers will actually use. Or if it aligns with your brand’s values. Take a look at all of your promotional emails through that lens and then decide which to pause, and which to keep sending.

We polled our webinar attendees about how their email send volume has changed in the light of the crisis, and the results show that the majority of brands (58%) have decreased their email sending volume, pausing sends that just don’t feel appropriate right now.

Should I turn off my onboarding emails? Monthly newsletters?

Jason: Just like with any email you’re sending, you want to review them first to see if they still make sense for subscribers and customers in the wake of COVID-19. More often than not, it’s a matter of adjusting some copy or content in your lifecycle emails or newsletters as opposed to turning them off wholesale.

Everyone is bombarding inboxes with the actions their business is taking during the time of crisis. How can a brand stand out from the communication clutter?

Jason: The best way is by providing real value for subscribers and displaying your own compassion for their situation (which is all of our situation). Too many companies are sending knee-jerk emails that do nothing more than signal virtues without providing actual help or resources to subscribers. If you want to stand out from all those, then don’t send one of those emails.

Take the time to think through what—if anything—your subscribers need from you right now. Sometimes, silence can make you stand out. If there isn’t an urgent need for them to hear from you, then not sending an email can speak volumes since you’re actively trying to prevent clutter and free them up to think about more important things than your brand.

If we haven’t sent a COVID-19 email yet, is it too late?

Jason: Nope! If anything, the delay has allowed you to absorb more of what’s going on and better understand a very fluid situation. It’s also given you time to see how other email marketers are addressing the pandemic. Use that time and extra information to figure out what—if anything—you should be sending to your subscribers.

As doctors and leaders learn more about the situation, it’s looking like we’re all going to be contending with COVID-19 for the next few months, not just the next few weeks. We all have time to figure out the best way to message and help our subscribers.

What should a travel company do for email marketing during this time of crisis?

Matthew Smith: These groups are one of the toughest to hit I think. I can imagine this is really difficult. I think the first thing you can do is to listen to your customers and ask some good questions about how they are feeling or doing. This might be a survey. This might be reaching out to 100 people from different segments. You could interview people about where they are dreaming of traveling when this whole crisis ends. You could interview people to tell their favorite travel stories. These stories and this learning translates into you listening to your customers where they are. You can share these stories in long form emails or snippets of cute shares. Imagine reading about Lisa and Katie who are stuck inside with their little dog Ginger. They’re tired and have been fighting about little stuff in the last week, but are finding some solace planning their next big trip to Peru when the airlines open up. Another thing you can do in this industry is to reveal more about your own team. Imagine seeing a post about what each of you are doing to weather the storm. I think I’m going to promote this over at RGE

I know you can do it. Think about what you’d do if your family were stuck in a snowstorm for a week. You’d figure out ways to connect and love each other. Do that. We need more of that!

This kind of opportunity will lead to connections and bonding between customers and business that will help dig you out of the hole we are all inevitably falling into economically.

Will halting email sends for a while affect email deliverability?

Jason: Completely halting all of your emails for a prolonged period of time could adversely affect your future deliverability, but I’d caution against taking that approach. It probably makes sense to turn off some emails, but your customers will still appreciate transactional emails and relevant updates from you, so keep sending them.

A potentially bigger risk is continuing with business as usual. It should be clear that, globally, nothing is business as usual anymore. Over the course of a very short period of time, what feels almost like overnight, the world has changed. All of us are left coping with that change, and senders treating things like they haven’t changed—sending the same, sales-y emails—risk offending subscribers, leading to unsubscribes and spam reports. I’d be more worried about that than reduced sending volumes or servers left cooling for a few weeks.

Once the dust settles and plans can start in order to bring operations fully back online, what recommendations are there to appropriately ramp up marketing efforts?

Jason: I’d recommend taking things slowly and continuing to respect your subscribers and what will be their shifting priorities. Even after the worst of the pandemic passes, things continue to change—whether that’s back to the office after a few weeks or months at home, scrambling to find a new job to replace the one you lost, or reduced income due to business closures, subscribers will still be struggling to feel normal. Their routines and habits will be disrupted, so you need to ease back into building those habits.

Hopefully, you’re keeping in touch with your subscribers throughout this—in a considered way—so you can start to reintroduce things like newsletters and promotions. But do it slowly with a focus on their needs and how those needs have changed since the coronavirus completely disrupted life around the world.

What is the right content strategy during this time across channels, not just email?

Jason: In my opinion, it’s compassion. My favorite definition of compassion, from the American Heritage Dictionary, is:

Deep awareness of the suffering of another accompanied by the wish to relieve it.

Regardless of which channel you’re using, I hope you’re striving to understand the problems of your customers and doing what you can to relieve it. That can take a lot of different forms, but I believe it’s the lens with which we should view all content strategy, inside of email and out.

Bettina Specht: Email marketing should never happen in a silo—and now more than ever it’s important that your brand is communicating the same information with a consistent tone and voice across channels.

How exactly that communication and content strategy looks will heavily depend on your brand and audience. If you’re a travel company, your communications will look different from a fashion retailer or a healthcare provider—and even in the same industry, different brands might take different approaches to their content strategy right now.

Looking at what other brands in your industry are doing can provide you with inspiration, but in the end you should focus on your brand and your audience. Come together with your team—your marketing leadership, customer support, your sales and communications leaders—to look at what your customers need right now, and how your brand can help cater to those needs.

How can we get traditional C-suite stakeholders to understand the value of empathy and empathetic digital messaging during this time?

Kristin Bond: Just like any other time when you’re trying to convince others to follow best practices, data is your friend. If you’ve already sent an email about COVID-19, look at its performance. It may have a higher open rate than normal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to keep sending them. It’s the most popular topic in the world right now—of course people are hungry for information.

If you’re continuing to send other promotional emails right now, look at how they’re doing. If conversions are lower right now, that doesn’t mean you should be sending more emails. While people might be less likely to spend right now, that won’t always be the case. You don’t want to lose subscribers over out-of-touch marketing now, because then you won’t have them later when things are back to normal. Insensitive messaging right now could also tank your deliverability if people are upset and mark it as spam. Don’t sacrifice long-term subscribers for short-term gains.

Other resources you might not have considered: your colleagues. Talk to your social media and customer care teams, as they’re on the frontlines and likely to have a pulse on your audience and how they react to any messaging your brand puts out. In my team’s creative meetings, any time someone floats a potentially risky idea, our social media team immediately knows exactly how our audience will likely react, and they help us craft the message in the best way possible—as well as plan out responses for any potential things people might not like. The same is true for your PR or communications team. They’re specially trained for crisis communications, and they understand the importance of a good brand story—and the damage a bad one can do. They can help craft messaging to ensure it’s sensitive and appropriate, while still meeting your business needs.

How can a B2B supplier promote products to clients without being tone-deaf about potential decrease in demand?

Jason: As with other types of email, just try to be respectful and honest. Understanding that you need to take advantage of what little demand is still around to make money, try to start a conversation with those businesses to see if they actually need your products right now. If they don’t, then try to hold off a bit so you don’t come off as insensitive. There might be other resources you can provide apart from your products that are more valuable to them today, even if they’re free. If you’re being truly helpful, they are more likely to remember that help when demand has increased again and buy from you as opposed to a competitor.

From a very practical standpoint, use the people you’re trapped at home with to help gut check your emails. If you are sending something, read the copy out loud to them and watch their reactions. Ask them if it comes across as tone-deaf or actually helpful. Don’t worry about them not being in the email industry—the feedback from non-marketers is almost always far more valuable than what comes out of our own industry bubble.

What imagery is appropriate to use in email campaigns right now?

Bettina: Empathy is crucial when deciding what to send and how to write your copy—and the same is true for other email creative, too. When looking at your existing emails, take a close look at the images you’re using to make sure they’re still appropriate. Be careful with imagery showing crowds or people holding hands—visuals that were absolutely fine just a few weeks ago might come across as insensitive today.

When sending notifications directly related to the epidemic, it can be hard to find the right image to support your message. That’s why you’ll see that many brands opt for a letter-style, text-based approach. Check out some examples on Really Good Emails.

Is a COVID-19 announcement a transactional email that I should send to my entire list?

Kristin: As always, you should only send an email as transactional if it meets the legal classifications of a transactional email. Chances are, your COVID-19 announcement email is not a transactional email you should send to your entire list. If you need to send a message that’s specifically about a transaction a customer has made with your company, then you can send that as a transactional email to the affected customer(s). Examples of that might be event cancellations or postponements, or other relevant changes to service such as shipping delays. I don’t think general retail store closures warrant a transactional email, but could be sent as a commercial email or posted on social media.

The post Best Practices for Email Marketing During a Crisis: Webinar Recording + Q&A appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

The email industry is constantly changing, but how will the ever-changing industry impact what email teams look like in 2020 and beyond? Which skills will be in hot demand in the future, and how can managers set up their email teams for future success?

We asked leading industry experts how they see email teams change in the years to come. Here are their predictions.

1. Demand for emails—and the talent to support them—will increase

The creative and managerial skills that made email an essential marketing and revenue channel at the turn of the 20th century aren’t the only ones that will move email into the core of the marketing mix for the next decade.

The one- or two-person team that could manage to build a weekly newsletter or daily promotion is no longer enough to handle the growing variety and technological, data, and reporting demands of a successful 21st century email program.

In Litmus’ 2019 State of Email Workflows report, we found smaller teams (1 to 3 full-time employees) were working with 1 to 5 emails at a time, while teams of 11 or more have 21 to 25 emails in varying states of production. The email channel continues to drive results, so brands are looking to send more and better emails—and they’re willing to spend more. In 2019, 33% of brands were planning to increase their budget for email team personnel.

“Email is being taken more seriously than it has been in past years. The C-suite is beginning to understand that investing in profitable email programs makes them even more profitable, rather than just settling for the returns they are getting from the channel.

Organizations are realizing that the people they hire to drive the marketing automation tool (email marketing specialists or managers) aren’t the same people they need to truly leverage the technology to increase ROI. A higher level person is needed, either a full-time employee or a consultant, who develops and oversees email optimization strategy on an ongoing basis.”

Jeanne Jennings, Founder and lead strategist, Email Optimization Shop

In the next decade, email marketers will need to make room on the bench for more players. Besides creative geniuses, teams will need technical marketers who understand the weirdness of the email channels and stay on top of new technological trends. Equally important will be strategists with the vision to look beyond day-to-day business needs to envision wider uses of email throughout the organization.

2. When email is part of a truly integrated program, email marketers must embrace other channels, too

It’s not just channel specialists that will be in high demand. As marketing teams embrace a truly integrated mindset and brands begin to look at the email channel to drive cross-channel campaign success, there will also be an increased need for marketers that understand both the email channel itself and its interaction with other channels.

“As email teams prove their worth as effective marketers within the organization, it helps show the team as thought leaders and strategists for groups outside of marketing.” 

Lauren Kremer, Litmus

Pre, Post, Perform There are three crucial pillars to email marketing success—and only when you master all three can you build a state-of-the-art email program that can positively impact your entire marketing mix. Learn more →

 
In the next decade, having working knowledge in other disciplines will become more crucial than ever for people looking to take on leadership roles in email marketing. Prepare yourself and your team for future success by learning more about channels that are about to get more closely intertwined with email—social media, paid media, content marketing, just to name a few—to prepare for the decade of truly connected marketing programs.

3. You’re never truly alone: The email marketing community will continue to thrive

The earliest email marketers had to teach themselves the art and practice of email. In the 2010s, that practical need spurred the creation of vibrant groups like Litmus’ Community, the Email Experience Council, or the #emailgeeks Slack community. These and other email groups share a mission to promote best standards and practices for email, often bringing competitors to the same table to work out solutions for everything from back-end coding to C-suite strategy and management.

“Staying engaged not just with the new processes of technologies we use but also being active within the larger email community will be a big part of continuing to be an effective email marketer.

Email wasn’t fine-tuned by just one person. Email marketing as effective communication wasn’t led by just one person. Even if you’re the only individual responsible for email at your company, there’s a world of people that are always willing to share insights and tips to help shine a light on this truly impactful marketing channel.”

Lauren Kremer, Litmus

In the next decade, the email community will grow stronger as it welcomes more and more members. If there’s one thing we’re certain of, it’s that #emailgeeks are incredibly supportive of each other and knowledgeable about what they do. Much like the demand for email talent will grow, demand for help from others will grow, too. As email marketers are asked to learn more skills—AMP, interactivity, AI, the list goes on—they’ll lean on each other and topic experts to grow their expertise. The list of community resources we have today is strong, and we’ll see more additions to help the community feel connected in the future.

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Interactivity continues to be one of the hottest trends in email design—and interactive hotspots are one of the most popular interactive elements in a marketer’s toolkit. Hotspots let your subscribers uncover additional information when they hover or click on an item in your email—and allow marketers to provide an additional layer of detail to their emails without making your email design feel too crowded.

In the February edition of our monthly newsletter, we used the power of interactive hotspots to show off some exciting updates we’ve made to the Litmus platform:

After we sent out the campaign, we received many questions from fellow email geeks about how exactly we created our hotspots—and how we made them work in Gmail. That’s why we’re here to share our step-by-step guide.

Read up on the details of how we designed and coded our hotspots below or check out the hotspot code on Litmus Builder—that’s where you find the exact placement of all the code elements we describe below.

1. Before you get started: Important considerations

Hover or click?

There are many different ways to code interactive hotspots in email. If I wanted hotspots that only activate on click or tap, I would consider using the Checkbox Hack, for example. However, we went with hotspots that activate on hover for a few reasons.

First, :hover is better supported in email clients than :checked—especially in one of our largest email clients, Gmail. Secondly, interactivity is still not very common in email so I wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to discover that they can interact with it. After all, hovering over a hotspot and seeing a tooltip appear immediately takes less effort than hovering and then clicking. Because I wanted to find a way that balanced functionality and support for the widest audience possible, hovered hotspots were the way to go.

Email client support: Are hotspots effective for your audience?

Interactive hotspots are a great way to make your email more engaging and more effective, but—like many interactive techniques—they aren’t supported in all email clients.

Before incorporating this technique into your repertoire, you definitely want to consider which email clients matter most to you and your stakeholders. According to Email Client Market Share, 79% of all email clients support the fully interactive versions of this hotspot technique. But your audience’s email client usage might look completely different from the global average. Take a close look at your own business’ market share for the most accurate data.

At Litmus, we used our Email Analytics tracking to determine that some of our top clients are Gmail (36.8%), Apple Mail (20.0%), and iPhone (13.2%) which make up a majority (70%) of our audience. Email clients that will show the fallback version make up only 30% of our audience.

With this data, it made sense for us to focus on creating a great interactive experience for our users, but this may not be the case if your audience skews more heavily towards Outlook for Windows. However, you should be constantly tracking and testing to make sure you have the most accurate and up-to-date analytics data! Email client market shares change over time as certain clients and devices become more popular (many companies have switched from Outlook to GSuite, for example), so it’s best not to rely on historical knowledge as to how things have always been done.

Check what level of functionality your top email clients support below.

Fully Interactive – Desktop
This is where hotspots are fully functional at desktop viewports.

• Apple Mail
• iPad
• Gmail
• Outlook (MacOS)

Fully Interactive – Mobile
This is where hotspots are fully functional at mobile viewports.

• iPhone Mail
• Gmail App (Android)*
• Samsung Mail

Fallback – Animated PNG
These clients (except for the ones with asterisks **) support animated PNGs and Dark Mode targeting, so we used a custom fallback transparent animated PNG that would animate on any background.

• Outlook.com
• Outlook App
• AOL
• AOL App
• Yahoo
• Yahoo App
• Outlook (Windows)**
• Windows Mail**

* Gmail App (iOS) shows hotspots but they aren’t tappable.

** These clients only show the first frame of animated PNGs, and do not support Dark Mode targeting. Even if we were to use an animated GIF, the flat colored background would mismatch with the Dark Mode view. On top of that, you can’t swap Light/Dark mode GIFs out since these clients also don’t support Dark Mode targeting. For these clients, we made sure that the first frame of the animated PNG still looked good.

2. Design planning: Mapping out the subscriber experience for all use cases

Did you determine that you have a solid business case for using interactive hotspots, and that a large portion of your audience will be able to enjoy it? Great! Now we can start designing out the potential views to build for.

Why do you need different views, you ask? The hotspot element won’t look the same on mobile and desktop. Plus, you’ll have to design a fallback for everyone who won’t be able to see the interactive version of the element. For us, we identified four key use cases that we tackled at the design stage:

Interactive: Desktop Width

When laying out the design for this, try not to overlap the tooltips with the hotspots too much.

We went with Animated PNGs for the hotspot images because we needed to achieve a smooth alpha-channel transparency that only PNGs can provide so that they could overlay the background image, and the slight animation—you see the hotspots pulsing—brings attention to the fact that you can interact with them.

Fallback: Desktop Width with fluid resizing to Mobile Width

The fallback version also uses an Animated PNG version of the entire hero section to emulate the effect of the hotspots being triggered.

At Litmus, we already use a hybrid fluid method for mobile resizing, so we can expect that all these fallback images will resize smoothly down to any screen width without requiring a specific mobile responsive version.

Interactive: Mobile Width

Because we want the tooltips to still be legible on smaller screens, we had to reconfigure the design so that all the tooltips show up in one central location whenever a hotspot was hovered instead of being attached to each hotspot individually.

Dark Mode

And of course, you don’t want to neglect the Dark Mode view.

3. Building your framework of key components

What are the elements that we need to make this work? Here, I’ll break down what each of the classes do. (Why do I use classes instead of targeting CSS selectors with other methods like specificity or chaining? Using shorter selectors speeds up the performance, and good class nomenclature makes it easier to understand and maintain so you can use it again and again!)

.wrapper-primary

• Wrapper for the entire interactive section.
  

.bgimg

• Background image foundation that you’ll position all your hotspots and tooltips on.

.wrapper-secondary 

• Wrappers for each section, with absolute positioning hack. (See explanation in “Positioning” section below.)
  

.hot-tool-wrapper

• Wrappers that contain each individual hotspot/tooltip section, with inline styles that position within the Desktop layout.
  

.hotspot-01, .hotspot-02, .hotspot-03, etc… 

• The actual images for the hotspot icons. They have individual class designations because they need to be individually positioned. Also, you don’t need to use an image—you can also use coded shapes if you prefer.
  

.tooltip-wrapper

• Wrapper for the tooltip and attached optional caret.
  

.caret (optional)

• These are optional because you may or may not want a caret for your design. These have custom inline CSS using margins to position it within the .tooltip-wrapper.
• These are hidden under the mobile responsive view because they don’t make sense with the new layout.
• Like the hotspot images, this can also be a coded CSS shape if you prefer.
  

.tooltip-content

• The actual tooltip content that appears when a hotspot is activated.

4. Putting it all together

Positioning the hotspots and tooltips

Because these hotspots and tooltip sections inevitably overlap each other, I needed a solution for placing them that resembled absolute positioning—which is unfortunately not well-supported in email. Luckily I found some inspiration with techniques from Mark Robbins and Justin Khoo (two of my favorite #EmailGeeks!) that use max-height:0, max-width:0, and margins to position elements in email!

CSS

.wrapper-secondary {
  max-height: 0px;
  max-width: 0px;
}
.hot-tool-wrapper {
  position: relative;
  display: inline-block;
  max-width: 0px;
}

HTML

<div class="wrapper-secondary">
  <div class="hot-tool-wrapper" style="margin-top:5px; margin-left: 55px;">
      [Hotspot & Tooltip content in here]
  </div>
</div>

Setting up the hover interaction

The mechanism causing the tooltips to appear is actually quite simple. The tooltips (.tooltip-wrapper) are hidden by default, and then when the hotspot (.hot-tool-wrapper) is hovered over, the tooltip is revealed. That’s it!

The opacity and transition styles add a slight fade to the interaction, making it feel more smooth.

CSS

.tooltip-wrapper {
  max-height: 0;
  opacity: 0;
  overflow: hidden;
  transition: 0.3s;
}
.hot-tool-wrapper:hover .tooltip-wrapper {
  max-height: none !important;
  opacity: 1 !important;
  transition: 0.3s;
}

Looking for a refresh on how to use hover effects in email? Check out this blog post.

Make it mobile responsive

To transform the desktop design to the mobile design, I needed to:

1. .wrapper-primary, .bgimg
   Resize the wrapper and background image
2. .hot-tool-wrapper
   Zero out the original desktop positioning to make it easier to separate the hotspots and tooltip positioning on mobile
3. .hotspot-01
   Re-position the individual hotspots to fit the smaller background image
4. .caret
   Hide the carets
5. .hotspot-01 + .tooltip-wrapper
   Reposition the tooltips so that they all appear in one area on the bottom

CSS

@media only screen and (max-width: 480px) {
  .wrapper-primary, .bgimg { 
    width: 350px !important; 
    height: 235px !important; 
  }
  .hot-tool-wrapper { 
    margin-top: 0 !important; 
    margin-left: 0 !important; 
  }
  .caret { 
    display: none !important; 
  }
  .hotspot-01 { 
    margin-left: 130px !important; 
    margin-top: 0 !important; 
  }
  .hotspot-01 + .tooltip-wrapper { 
    margin-left: 60px !important; 
    margin-top: 130px !important; 
  }
}

Set up the fallback

Finally, here are all the pieces that go into making sure the interactive and fallback versions show up for the correct email clients. Many of these techniques can be found on How To Target Email Clients. Here, I’ve separated out each targeting technique by email client to make it easier to see what’s going on. Please refer back to the original code to see how these have all been combined together in the final product.

Targeting All Outlook (except MacOS): CSS

.outlookshow { display: none !important; }

body[data-outlook-cycle] .outlookshow { display:block !important; width: auto !important; overflow: visible !important; float: none !important; max-height:inherit !important; max-width:inherit !important; line-height: auto !important; margin-top:0px !important; visibility:inherit !important;}

body[data-outlook-cycle] .outlookhide { display:none !important; display:none; overflow:hidden; float:left; width:0px; max-height:0px; max-width:0px; line-height:0px; visibility:hidden; }

[class~="x_outlookshow"] { display:block !important; width: auto !important; overflow: visible !important; float: none !important; max-height:inherit !important; max-width:inherit !important; line-height: auto !important; margin-top:0px !important; visibility:inherit !important;}

[class~="x_outlookhide"] { display:none !important; display:none; overflow:hidden; float:left; width:0px; max-height:0px; max-width:0px; line-height:0px; visibility:hidden; }

Targeting All Outlook (except MacOS): HTML

<!--[if !mso]><! -->
<div class="outlookhide">
        [Interactive Content Here]
</div>
<!--<![endif]-->

<!--[if !mso]><! -->
<div class="outlookshow">
<!--<![endif]-->
        [Fallback Content Here]
<!--[if !mso]><! -->
</div>
<!--<![endif]-->

Targeting Yahoo: CSS 
This must be nested within the <body> tag to target the Yahoo App as well, and you can use any unicode character in place of as long as it doesn’t get auto-converted by your ESP. This technique also happens to target AOL as well, which is an unfortunate side-effect because AOL actually supports interactivity very well. But due to the fact that AOL market share isn’t very significant for our audience, I had to make a judgment call to cut it.

<body>
<!-- START force fallback on Yahoo -->
<style>
    .& # .yahoohide {display: none !important;}
    .& # .yahooshow {display: block !important;}
</style>
<!-- END force fallback on Yahoo -->

</body>

Targeting Yahoo: HTML

<table id=""><tr><td>

<div class="yahoohide">
    [Interactive Content Here]
</div>

<div class="yahooshow">
    [Fallback Content Here]
</div>

</td></tr></table>

The final result

To see how all these elements come together in the final product, check out the element’s full code or see the full code of our February newsletter to see it all in the context of an email.

Now, over to you!

Are you planning to use hotspots in any of your upcoming campaigns? Have you used hotspots in the past but built them using a different technique? We’d love to see how creative email marketers like you are using hotspots to make your emails even more special. Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below or reach out on Twitter @litmusapp.

We can’t wait to see all the beautiful, interactive emails you’ll build!

The post Interactive Hotspots in Email: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..