Is your email team suddenly forced to work from home and you’re not quite sure how to stay on top of your email tasks without the ability to collaborate in person?

Luckily, there’s a whole set of tools out there that can help your email team feel connected and get work done when you can’t meet face-to-face—and Slack is probably one of the most popular tools powering remote teams. 

Here at Litmus, we heavily rely on Slack as well. That’s why we wanted to share our top 5 tips and tricks from our fully remote email team and the community on how your email team can use the power of Slack to get campaigns out the door faster, stay in sync with the rest of your team, and feel less alone when you can’t be together in person.

1. Create a Slack channel dedicated to all things email

Having a dedicated channel for your email team and other members of the marketing team to chat about upcoming campaigns, due dates, and questions is a simple but effective way to create a virtual space for all things email. 

Here at Litmus, we use our #email-team Slack channel as the go-to place for everyone to ask and discuss email-related questions: What time is today’s campaign going out again? Why do we think this newsletter performed so much better than last month’s version? Are we ready to hit send on the next big campaign? Having one dedicated place to consolidate all things email can help both your email team and team members outside of email marketing feel connected—especially when working remotely. 

Our #email-team channel is also the place for Litmus’ team to share and collectively marvel at campaigns we spotted in our inbox that we love. Your email team channel doesn’t have to be focused on project work only—it can be a joint place for your team to share inspiration and best practices, too.

2. Take advantage of the power of Slack Integrations with your email tools

On average, a marketing team is leveraging at least a dozen tools to run a successful program (some using over 30 tools!), and 27% of teams said that a lack of integration between their marketing tech stack is a major impediment to achieving their business goals. Hopping between tools is not only time-consuming, but it leaves room for error, miscommunications, and siloed data.

If your marketing and email teams heavily rely on Slack to communicate, integrating your existing tools with Slack can help make your email creation process more seamless.

Does your team use Google Docs for copywriting? The Slack integration for Google Drive makes sharing copy docs and previews easier. Popular project management tools like Trello or Asana let you easily manage tasks in Slack. Your email service provider might also offer a Slack integration that could help your team streamline your processes. And if there isn’t a native integration available, tools like Zapier can help you connect Slack with your favorite email tools, depending on your unique workflow.

Litmus’ integration with Slack

If you’re using Litmus to create, test, and collaborate on campaigns, the Litmus + Slack integration can help you keep projects moving and stakeholders in the loop. Here’s how our own email team uses the automatic Litmus notifications in Slack: 

• Keep a pulse on the progress of campaigns with automatic Slack notifications.
  When the status of a campaign changes within Litmus—for example, when a Proof is ready for review or when a Checklist is approved—an automated notification pushes the update to Slack. That helps our email team and all stakeholders involved stay on top of what campaigns are in the works and where we need to take action.
  
  Here at Litmus, we send all campaign status updates as a channel notification to a dedicated Slack channel, and everyone who’s interested in following our team’s campaign progress can subscribe to that channel. But you can also set up notifications as private messages, depending on your unique workflow.
• Use Proof notifications to get feedback and collect approvals faster
  Collecting feedback from your team and getting approval from stakeholders can be a painful task. The Litmus integration for Slack can speed up that process, just as it did for our email team. Whenever we tag a team member on a Proof, they receive a Slack notification immediately—making it easy to take action quickly. 

Learn more about the Litmus integration for Slack and learn how to connect Litmus and Slack to get started.

3. Create a dedicated channel to let your team see all outgoing campaigns

Slack isn’t only a powerful tool to help teams collaborate, it can also be a fantastic channel to help your broader company stay connected to what campaigns your team is sending. 

Set up a Slack channel that’s dedicated to sharing view-online links to make it easy for your colleagues within and outside of marketing to see which messages your brand’s customers are receiving at what time—insights that can help fine-tune customer support and sales conversations. 

4. Join other teams’ channels

Email marketing should never happen in a silo because that’s not how your customers experience your brand, either. 

If your team has channels for related marketing disciplines, encourage your email team to join them. As an email marketer, you have unique insights into what messaging resonates with your audiences and what email strategies and tactics help drive business results. Being an active part of conversations within other parts of your marketing organization allows you to share these insights on an ongoing basis, opening the door to using email insights to drive results throughout all marketing channels. 

But you should also use this as an opportunity to actively listen. Just as your colleagues can learn from your email program, you too will benefit from other team’s learnings. Slack provides you with the unique opportunity to be part of multiple conversations at once—whether it’s an engaged conversation with your social media colleagues or in active listening mode in the customer support channel. 

Joining other team’s Slack channels can be a unique opportunity to observe conversations and actively listen to chatter from other teams that—in a co-located office—would likely happen behind closed doors. Use Slack as a chance to help break down marketing silos and keep your email team connected to the rest of the organization.

 5. Provide spaces for your team to connect on non-work related topics 

This is especially important when you’re new to remote work, since it’s easy to feel lonely. 

The good news is that Slack isn’t only a great tool to power work-related communication and keep projects moving, it’s also a way for your team to connect with others on a personal level.

Here at Litmus, there are numerous non-work-related Slack channels available for our team members to join if they’re looking for some chatter outside of the daily work routine. The #pets channel is the place to go to find photos of Litmus pets to brighten up your day. You’ll find fellow parents chat about their kids and family life in #parents. Recipe tips and food talk can be found in #cooking. We chat about our favorite reads in #books and listen to music together in #jukebox.

There are countless great ideas for how you can keep your remote team connected. You’ll have to figure out what works for you and your team, but setting up dedicated spaces on Slack for team members to connect on topics outside of work can be a simple yet powerful way to help your team feel less alone.

For more tips on how to use Slack for remote teams, check out these resources:

• Slack Blog: Your guide to working remotely in Slack
• Thoughts from Brendan Caffrey, VP of Engineering at Litmus: Constantly interrupted at work? Slack is not your problem.
• Buffer Blog: 14 Slack Bots and Apps for Remote Teams to Help With Team Building, Meetings and Celebrations

The post How Distributed Email Teams Can Use Slack to Keep Projects Moving (And Stay Connected) appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

You’re giving your email campaign the finishing touches, running one more round of previews to make sure everything looks great and there it is… a rendering issue in Outlook 2013. Should you jump back into your code and fix it or just let it go?

It’s not always easy to know where to focus your email optimization efforts. Sure, we all want our emails to look great for every subscriber—but the truth is, spending hours of troubleshooting code and fixing errors in a niche email client might not be the best use of your time—time that could be better spent innovating and improving ROI.

Email rendering is complex, with as many as 15,000 variations out there, so how should you decide which email clients are a priority?

Here are three different ways you can approach your email testing and troubleshooting process and the benefits and drawbacks that come with each.

1. Test your email in every single email client and device

As an email marketer, it’s only natural that you want to give every subscriber the best experience possible. That means you might try to make your email look great in every single email client that’s out there.

That goal can quickly turn into a herculean task. A code change that fixes a small rendering issue in one email client might cause your email to look broken in one or more other clients. The more you try to fix, the more problems might pop up elsewhere. It’s an email designer’s hydra, growing more heads for every single one you cut off.

Tools like Litmus Email Previews make it easier than ever to preview your emails in 90+ environments in just seconds. But the truth is, making your email look pixel-perfect in every email client can feel like an impossible task—and the question is, should you even attempt to do so?

If you’re getting stuck on a rendering issue in an email client your subscribers aren’t even using, your testing and troubleshooting process is unnecessarily complex and you likely waste hours of coding time on fixing a problem that none of your subscribers would have ever noticed.

2. Use the email client market share data—and only test in the most popular clients

How about if instead of trying to make your email look perfect everywhere you focus your resources on the most popular clients?

The global email client market share provides great insights into which email clients are the most popular—and you can use it to focus your testing efforts on the email clients that cover, let’s say, 95% of the global market share.

In theory, this approach allows you to balance testing and troubleshooting efforts and brand consistency, but there’s one important aspect to consider: Your subscribers aren’t the average. And with that, your audience’s email client usage might differ significantly from the global average.

Are you working in a highly regulated industry in a B2B context? It’s likely that your share of subscribers opening in older versions of Outlook or Lotus Notes is significant—even though those clients might not even make it on the list of the global top ten. Are you a B2B retailer sending to a German audience? You might see the majority of subscribers opening your emails in GMX and Web.de.

Only relying on global averages when deciding where to focus your testing efforts has two risks: You might put your troubleshooting resources into email clients that aren’t relevant to your audience, or you might ignore a rendering issue because an email client isn’t that popular in the global ranking without realizing that issue is seen by a large part of your audience.

3. Test in the email clients that matter most to your audience

What if you had reliable insights into which email clients your audience is using to read your emails—and then you could focus your optimization efforts to make your campaigns look perfect in these very clients? With Litmus Email Analytics, you can do just that.

Our Email Analytics provide detailed and actionable insights into which email clients your audience is using, so you can make an educated decision on which email clients matter for your testing and are most popular for your audience—and which ones you can safely skip without taking big risks.

Looking at our own email client insights, it’s a no brainer that we want our emails to look nothing but perfect in Gmail and Apple Mail.. But what if we have a small alignment issue in Outlook 2007? Knowing that it might only be seen by 0.1% of our readers, we can confidently make the call to not invest too much time in troubleshooting it.

These insights allow you to make data-backed decisions on where you spend your resources so you can streamline your efforts without compromising your subscribers’ experience.

Targeted email testing made easy with email client recommendations in Litmus

With Email Client Recommendations in Litmus, we’re bringing email client popularity insights right into your testing workflow. You’ll see a recommended list of clients you should be testing, right inside of Litmus Checklist, based on actual subscriber data and updates to the clients and devices Litmus supports.

Learn more →

The post Which email clients should I test in? appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

What if I told you there was a way to make your email efforts go even farther? By setting up your email campaigns for success from the start and taking time to find insights about your audience, you can use what you know about subscribers to help your marketing team make informed decisions across the entire marketing mix.

That’s a lot to process, so let’s break it down. We believe a successful email-first program has three pillars—Pre, Post, and Perform. The first pillar, Pre, is everything that goes into creating the most effective email campaigns possible. The second pillar, Post, focuses on uncovering insights that are useful for improving future email content, personalization, design, and more. The third pillar, and the one we’ll focus on today, is Perform.

In the Perform stage of the email process, you share insights about what is most engaging your email audiences across your entire team to improve overall marketing effectiveness. Breaking out of silos empowers email teams to pass on what they’ve discovered so other marketing groups can make data-driven decisions for their specific channels.

We understand that cross-team collaboration may be new to some or even seem a bit abstract, so we’ve rounded up examples of what the Perform pillar looks like in action.

How Litmus uses email insights

You didn’t expect us to talk the talk and not walk the walk, did you? We believe in this strategy so much because we’ve seen it in action, firsthand. Here’s a real scenario, as shared by VP of Marketing at Litmus, Cynthia Price:

A blog post we featured in an email generated incredible engagement. We used this insight to inform our strategy and featured that topic as a call-to-action in a social and paid media campaign. The result? We more than doubled our average click-through rate!

By using content or messaging that has already gotten results with an engaged segment of your audience—your email subscribers—you can apply what you know to stand out amongst potential customers. After all, your subscriber base is a representation of those people you’re trying to reach with the rest of your marketing. What better way to see what’s breaking through the noise?

10 ways to use email insights beyond email

Every marketer is looking to make data-driven decisions for their respective channel or program, so they can get the best possible results—and chances are that your entire marketing organization will benefit from subscriber insights. Here are a handful of scenarios where you could share subscriber insights across your team—and even across other departments—to help with strategy.

1. Improve targeting

Getting your message in front of the right audience is as important as the message itself. 

The email team can identify the most engaged (and high-spending) customers via revenue per subscriber and lifetime value. From this segment, your paid ads team can create a lookalike audience to target more efficiently.

2. Prioritize content

In addition to choosing topics, your content team needs to consider format and distribution. Want to know what potential customers want to see? Look at what current users enjoy and interact with the most. For example, let’s say your emails that touch on some of the “soft skills” your subscribers are trying to learn have engagement rates twice as high as other content. Realizing that these are compelling topics, your marketing team can create a panel discussion or video series on those challenging topics that is designed to generate new leads or subscribers.

3. Tailor sales approaches

The sales process is an art and a science, but having data to support methods helps the sales team work and test more effectively. A/B testing could reveal that there are different upsell messaging winners among each customer segment. With this information in hand, the sales team can tailor their approach to different customer types.

4. Adapt promotion strategies

Promotions come in all shapes and sizes, and finding the best offer may require some testing. However, the email team could share that forward rates are higher on refer-a-friend emails when the offer is cash back, but the program yields more high-value referrals when exclusive access to new products is on the line. Knowing what drives quality over quantity can help the team running promotions tweak their strategy. 

5. Uncover product opportunities

Customers send signals or feedback about what kinds of updates they’d like in the future, including through email. For example, you could find customers that showed a higher interest in a particular feature in an email have higher retention rates. Noting this connection, your product team can put more attention on that critical element during the in-app product tour.

6. Optimize for preferred devices

Knowing what devices your subscribers prefer helps the email team prioritize testing. How can other teams benefit from device insights? For one, it can help your company understand how users move between devices for different types of tasks. The email, product, and web teams can compare notes on which devices and browsers are most common for their channel. Are the same devices used between channels? If so, is there a consistently excellent experience across all company touch points on that device? If the top devices aren’t consistent, what could that teach you about how customers interact with you?

7. Spot changing customer preferences

While some email subscribers will come and go, as a whole, email is a consistent and measurable channel. This means it’s a gold mine for tracking trends and preferences over time, particularly with the most engaged subscribers. For example, as a segment matures, the email team notices the cohort isn’t as interested in a content topic as they were before. By passing this insight onto the C-Suite, leadership can launch a customer research campaign that reveals customers are evolving, and an altered strategy is needed. 

8. Influence design

Email engagement times let marketers know what’s most compelling to subscribers. Imagine engagement times on emails with photos of people are higher than illustration-forward campaigns. Other teams can apply this information to update website design and social media imagery.

9. Create global messaging

If your company has a global audience, you should be using email insights to learn about regional differences. For example, your email team can use location-based segmentation or dynamic content to test positioning in different areas. After they find out messaging that overperforms in one country fails in another, they share what they’ve learned with other teams. With this information, the web design team creates dynamic headlines based on location to improve the visitor experience and increase conversions on the site.

10. Understand the buyer’s journey

What does it take to qualify a lead or move a prospect from browser to buyer? You can use email sequences to understand how different journeys affect conversion and retention. For example, email testing reveals that conversions are higher when an ebook is shared early in the lead nurture sequence. This information is shared with the sales team who uses the topic in prospect discussions, and with the content team who considers how that compares to the buyer’s journey they assumed.

Sharing email insights across the entire company has a lot of benefits. It puts real, customer-driven data at the center of strategies, helps each team use their budget most effectively based on proven insights, and increases communication so everyone can work towards common goals.

A few essential components need to be in place for the Perform pillar to be effective, though. To start, the other two pillars need to be in place. A streamlined pre-send process ensures teams can increase output while reducing mistakes. Also, post-send analysis tools equip email marketers with the information they need to continually improve. A company also needs organization-wide buy-in and collaboration to realize the benefits of sharing these insights.

The post 10 Ways You Can Use Email Insights Across Your Entire Company appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Though the initial rush of COVID-19 emails may have subsided, the need for email marketing to be empathetic and helpful during these times hasn’t (and never should). Much like you, here at Litmus we’ve been getting plenty of emails in our inboxes about what companies are doing to support their employees, their subscribers, and the community as a whole, and we’ve been taking a close look at how those companies stay connected to their subscribers using the most powerful channel they’ve got: email.

What we found is there are so many brands out there pivoting their messaging to solely focus on helping subscribers, keep everyone up to date on what they’re doing to ensure the safety of their customers and employees, and remain as helpful as possible, no matter what that might look like. What works for one brand might not work for another but it’s always helpful to learn, so we pulled together some examples from brands across different industries—empathetic emails that were just right for their products and audiences.

Asana provides resources for working remotely, from a team brand new to remote work

Like many teams across the globe, Asana’s employees have shifted to full-time remote work for the very first time and are learning how to navigate this new dynamic—and they know their customers are, too.

Asana sent out a few different emails to customers about their response to COVID-19, but this email is solely focused on remote work resources, including how Asana can help you work remotely.

Chock-full of resources of all kinds—articles to read, guides to peruse, webinars to watch—Asana’s email is an excellent example of providing relevant, engaging content that’s helpful for everyone, whether you’re a customer of theirs or not, and ties in the Asana product in a way that’s powerful without being pushy. Plus, at the bottom of the email, Asana highlights how they’re supporting their nonprofit customers (and potential customers) during this time of need by providing free accounts for eligible groups; this is just another wonderful way that Asana is focusing on customers and the community.

What you can learn from this email: Are you and your customers in the same boat? That’s an opportunity to pull back the curtain, show how your team has been handling the challenges—and build a human, personal connection along the way.

McDonald’s convinces with transparency, sharing every step they’re taking to keep customers and employees safe

Normally, restaurants provide a sense of community—they’re a place to meet and hang out after school or work, a much-needed treat after a soccer game, or simply a weekly routine. So during times of crisis, it’s easy to see why restaurants are considered an essential service. Though the basic elements of creating community might be lost when in-person dining closes, restaurants everywhere can still provide a feeling of normalcy, and this isn’t lost on McDonald’s.

Rather than sending out an email with condolences or well wishes to subscribers, McDonald’s takes this email to create transparency and lay out a concrete plan for next steps, including the increased sanitation of all locations, closing children’s playgrounds in restaurants, encouraging the community to move to the Drive-Thru, and encouraging employees to wash their hands more regularly and be as cautious as possible. With a letter-style, simple design that doesn’t utilize any imagery, McDonald’s makes sure the focus is on the copy.

Though it may be a bit long, McDonald’s wastes none of their words and says, without a doubt, that the community and employees around the world are their “number one priority.”

What you can learn from this email: What are the questions that your subscribers might have right now? Put those at the center of your messaging and don’t be afraid of using simple, no-fuss designs to frame copy that has the answers. If the focus of your campaign is on transparent copy that provides guidance, a simple, letter-style design might just be the best fit.

Tattly shares fun activities to do at home with family

In our webinar on best practices for email marketing during a crisis, one of the best practices we mention is “The world is chaotic. Don’t add to that chaos.” Tattly, a company that provides temporary tattoos by real artists, practices this idea perfectly.

Nearly everyone is feeling elevated levels of anxiety, and many of us have divided attention with children at home, too. So with this email, Tattly’s goal was to provide joy to subscribers by providing “tried-and-true DIY activities that we know both kids and kids-at-heart will love doing at home.”

These activities are not tied to their product in any way—and in fact, when they do mention their product, it’s framed in a way to send some light and joy to someone else instead of yourself. Plus, it’s hard to not feel cheery with Tattly’s fun, colorful email design. (Shout out to the pun at the end of their email that these uncertain times are only temporary, just like their tattoos.)

What you can learn from this email: When it seems like everyone is sending out their own version of a crisis email for COVID-19, it can feel really hard to stand out and provide true value to your subscribers. It’s important to think about what your subscribers and customers truly need at this time—and that might not be your product, but something you can offer, like Tattly’s curated list of DIY activities. Take a moment to ask yourself if you provide something your subscribers truly need, and if the answer is no, think of other ways you can provide value and avoid adding to the chaos.

Everlane supports national nonprofits

One of the biggest groups hit by this crisis—and the suspension of in-person events—is nonprofits. Plus, they can’t necessarily pivot their messaging away from donation and business as usual, either, since they depend on those donations to stay afloat already.

One way that some companies in other industries have decided to pivot their messaging is by supporting nonprofits local to them, whether donating all or a percentage of profits, volunteering, or by other means. Everlane is partnering with Feeding America by donating 100% of their profits of a new, specific collection during this time, and they use this email to announce their partnership.

Everlane knows that clothes—especially nonessentials—aren’t necessarily what you’re interested in spending money on right now. But a new product line that entirely benefits a nonprofit might resonate with your audience and build relationships in the long-term.

What you can learn from this email: Everlane says it best in their email: “We’re in this together.” If your brand is in a position where you can support nonprofits and organizations on the front lines during a crisis, consider that approach for a percentage of your overall profits, 100% of the profits of a new product line, or some other form of support—and share the news with your email subscribers and customers. Nearly everyone is looking for a way to help others right now, and providing a way to do that for your customers like Everlane has done is top-notch.

MADE asks their subscribers what they need

Some companies are in a position where they offer products that are in high demand right now—we’re thinking home workout apps, puzzle makers, grocery stores, productivity tools for remote work—but others aren’t, and are finding themselves in need of a messaging switch.

When many customers are cutting down on expenses (and your products might not be on the top of the priority list), what should your brand do? Can you continue to market without coming across as tone-deaf?

If you’re one of the brands struggling to figure out what to say and how to say it, check out this powerful example from designer furniture company MADE.

They’re still open and delivering to customers, but they want to make sure to provide relevant, helpful information to email subscribers instead of acting like business as usual. But they also realize that everyone’s spending a bit more time at home than normal, and that makes you think differently about how your home office is arranged and what makes you comfortable. With that in mind, MADE decided to directly ask subscribers what would be helpful for them and their families.

What you can learn from this email: Listening to your audience and understanding what content resonates with them is one of the most crucial aspects of marketing—and that’s especially true in times of a crisis when a well-intended campaign might come across as tone-deaf. Don’t be afraid to ask your subscribers for feedback on what they’d like to hear from you, either by replying to your emails, filling out a survey, sharing their thoughts on social, or whatever other feedback channels you might find appropriate.

Did another brand stand out to you in your inbox? Share them in the comments!

The post Genuine, Empathetic, and Subscriber-Centric: 5 Examples of Great Email Communication During COVID-19 appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Like many CMOs, I’ve spent the past few weeks navigating through our new normal and what these changes mean for Litmus, our customers, and the email marketing community. That includes how to strike the right tone with our marketing programs, while also helping out brands when and where we can through education and sharing.

While some changes in our marketing organizations and businesses might be temporary, many are likely to be far more permanent. Marketing budgets are shifting, moving from offline channels—such as in-person events and out-of-home advertising—to digital-led experiences. A recent survey from Advertisers Perceptions found that two-thirds (65%) of advertisers agree that the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic will result in advertisers focusing spend on media that can show direct outcomes. With so much changing so fast, it is not surprising that many brands are pausing some marketing channels and refocusing on their most reliable marketing programs—like email—to create one-to-one connections with their customers and foster those relationships during this difficult time.

As a brand marketer, it is important to remember that while your subscribers and customers might not be buying right now, everyone is listening and learning. This is a time that can make or break your brand, as consumers are viewing communications and actions of brands through a much more critical lens. Retaining subscribers and contacts and fostering those relationships over the next couple of months—even when consumers may not be in a position to buy—will set you up to revive those conversations quickly when the time is right.

By putting email first in your marketing mix, you can bridge social distances, create personalized experiences, and deliver better customer care. As you move forward with an email-first strategy, here are some practical tips to help ensure your program is effective and consistently delivers authentic experiences.

1. Engage with empathy. Every email—transactional, automated, and nurtures—must have the appropriate tone and content given what is going on in the world.
2. Don’t skip steps. The content and design of every email should be reviewed, re-reviewed, and approved by important stakeholders throughout your marketing organization.
3. Make sure every email is perfect. This is simply not the time to send the dreaded “Oops, we made a mistake email.” Your email program is the primary way to maintain and develop customer relationships. So, every email you send must be of the highest quality, reach the inbox, and create a personalized experience. 
4. Adapt to change and move quickly. Collaborating with remote and distributed marketing teams can be challenging, but it’s paramount to success. Your martech solutions should make it easy to collaborate on emails, automate and streamline robust testing, and integrate with your ESP to reduce manual steps.
5. Create compelling, relevant, and personalized email experiences. To achieve this, you need to understand your subscribers’ challenges in the context of their new normal. Go beyond basic open and click-through rates 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. Apply these powerful insights to get closer to your customers, increase engagement with your campaigns, and improve performance of your overall marketing mix.

With so much at stake, an effective email program is mission-critical to helping you navigate through change and get the best possible results from all of your marketing channels. By putting email first and executing email marketing in the right way, your brand is better positioned to build lasting relationships, show customers you care, and assure them you are in this with them for the long haul.

The post Leading Email Marketing Through Change appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

It’s harder than ever to win over new customers, so now is the perfect time to focus on keeping the ones you already have. Email marketers, let’s make customer retention your number one priority.

Even during less challenging times, it can cost up to 16x more to acquire a new customer than retain a current one. Retention consists of many moving pieces, channels, and metrics, but overall it boils down to one main goal: increasing engagement and deepening your customers’ connection to your brand.

Email is your most powerful marketing channel and one of the best ways to strengthen your bonds with customers—and now, when customer acquisition is slowing down, those relationships are more valuable than ever. So let’s run through five top ways you can lean on email to keep customers.

1. Audit your automated emails
2. Build your segmentation based on customer activity
3. When you can’t use email to win their business, use it to win their hearts
4. Leave on a good note
5. Think about how to bring lapsed customers back when the time comes

1. Audit your automated emails

Take a look through the copy and tone of your automated messaging to make sure it matches the tone of the current times and speaks to your existing customers. This is also a good time to evaluate your current customer journey and every outgoing campaign through the eyes of an existing customer to see if you can provide any extra support or thoughtful touches via email.

Here are some customer-first examples of emails that could take your nurtures to the next level.

Thank you and appreciation emails

With a thought to over-cluttering inboxes, a well-timed and executed thank you note can go a long way, particularly post purchase. You can also use this opportunity to point out additional resources, highlight support contacts, or offer a discount on the next purchase.

Here’s a great example from Classic Specs: a great thank you message, handy tips for their purchase, and some helpful FAQ. 10/10 would read again!

Usage digests or reports

Letting customers know the exact value they’re getting from your product through regular usage update emails is a great way to increase engagement. (Bonus points if you can tie usage metrics to a specific ROI.)

This is a fun example from Swiftype; they provide a nice and nerdy rundown of your typing activity with updates on your weekly changes:

Targeted campaigns based on past interaction with your brand

Know your customers well? Show them! Use previous purchases to suggest similar products or create a tailored offer that’s just right for them.

This example from Zillow is a nice way to easily bring customers back with a list of previously viewed homes:

Here’s a good one from Crate and Barrel as well that incorporates a thank you and some recommendations for future purchases:

Nonpayment and dunning emails

The last thing you need right now is losing a customer who’s otherwise ready to pay because of an expired credit card, or similar issues. If you already have emails in place to address failed payment, it’s a good time to check these to ensure your tone is friendly and helpful and you offer different ways to complete payments.

Putting a simple series of dunning emails in place to collect payment can save your support or finance teams lots of time, prevent your customers from losing access or service, and help you reduce churn. Consider adding a custom discount or save offer to the end of your series—even if it’s temporary—to sweeten the deal for customers you might lose otherwise.

This example from Benchmark has the perfect balance of support and compassion while letting you know that your credit card payment failed:

2. Build your segmentation based on customer activity

We’re all being inundated with emails right now. Double-check your list segmentation or adjust your levers to make sure you’re not overwhelming folks who aren’t as engaged with you right now. Don’t worry, there’s an opportunity at the other end of this to bring them back into your world, but for now, err on the side of caution. According to research by Mailchimp, list segmentation has an incredible effect on overall email marketing engagement and keeps your lists healthy, wealthy, and wise. There are so many ways to segment your audience, but segmenting by customer engagement can be a helpful way to slice your audience with retention goals in mind. Here are some starting points for all kinds of organizations.

Promoters, very active users, active buyers

Your biggest fans should get the red carpet treatment with personalized emails based on their actions or purchases—just like David’s Tea does with this wonderful campaign:

Passives, semi-active users, occasional buyers

Those folks who aren’t super connected to your brand might need to learn more about you, and this gives you the chance to learn more about them, too. What would make your passives turn into loyalists? This email from Prezi does a great job presenting a new template and makes it easy for the reader to dive into the product—and that might bring inactive users back to Prezi.

Detractors, inactive users, infrequent buyers

People who haven’t had a chance to get to know you or might be a little skeptical need a special touch. Using education to drive people back to your site is an effective strategy for all types of businesses. Remind your subscribers of the value of your product and how easy it is to get started—just like Google does in this email for Google ads:

It may also be the time to decrease communications to this group; everyone is getting a lot of communication right now and your less engaged customers may need a break—and that’s ok.

3. When you can’t use email to win their business, use it to win their hearts

As a brand marketer, it’s important to remember that while your subscribers and customers might not be buying right now, everyone is listening and learning. If the current times make it hard for you to drive revenue, think about ways you can use email to pay-in on the brand trust bank. Build an emotional connection with your subscribers that keeps current customers from leaving and makes prospects want to support you whenever budgets are available again.

Provide helpful resources that go beyond your product

What content can you provide that helps your customers navigate these challenging times? This email from Asana offers helpful, relevant, and timely resources that their customers need right now:

Show how your brand takes responsibility

What does your brand do to support your team and the community in these trying times? Customers are less likely to leave you if they support your mission, so use the power of email to show how your brand is making a difference. This email from Everlane is a wonderful example:

4. Leave on a good note

Whether you’re in SaaS, hospitality, travel, or retail, many companies are losing customers right now. And while seeing a customer leave might hurt now more than ever, it’s crucial you’re handling this step of your customers’ lifecycle with grace and empathy.

Optimize your cancellation confirmation emails

You never want your customers to leave with a bad taste in their mouths, so ensure your cancellation confirmation emails are friendly, thoughtful, and offer opportunities for your customers to get in touch with you.

Give your customers the chance to let you know why they’re leaving

Having good insights into cancellation reasons is the first step to successful win-back campaigns. Are your customers leaving because of budget cuts caused by COVID-19, or are they leaving because your product didn’t meet their needs? Knowing this will heavily impact future reactivation campaigns.

5. Think about how to bring lapsed customers back when the time comes

Here’s the good news though: Some of that churn will come back.

What’s your plan for turning churned customers into active buyers again? When the time comes, having a strategy already in place to bring back your customers in a thoughtful, compassionate way gives you a chance to quickly ramp up your business again, providing a good cushion when retention or activation goals might still be less than desirable.

The best winback or reactivation campaigns are founded on good segmentation. You may want to use the general lists detailed out earlier in this post as a starting point; or, if you have cancellation reasons that folks select when they leave, you may want to segment your communications by those reasons.

Here are some good examples of winback emails based on segment.

We miss you

Sometimes just a gentle reminder, with an incredibly easy way to sign back up or make a repeat purchase, is a great way to bring customers back whenever they’re ready.

Incentives and discounts

This works great for folks who were high purchasers. If you’re a SaaS company, consider an incentive or discount for someone that selected cost as a reason for cancelling.

Product updates

If you’ve made a big update or addressed customer feedback, why not let them know? This might be the nudge a lapsed customer needs to come back.

Keeping customers is tough, but moving forward with empathy and reminding your customers that you’re here for them in trying times is the first step towards building goodwill. Building a strong email program to support customers has to start with making tough decisions to put your customers first—and then you can back that up with first-class marketing.

The post 5 Tips for Increasing Customer Retention with Email Marketing appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

If you’re using Litmus to create, optimize, and analyze your campaigns you know that your account is full of features that let you speed up your email workflow.

But do you know all the helpful Litmus tricks that can help you save time and improve your campaigns?

Here are 10 Litmus power-user tips that will up-level your email game even more.

1. Improve Subscriber Segmentation
2. Quickly Recapture Email Previews
3. Easily Run Spam Tests Via Your ESP
4. Ensure Your Email Design is Accessible to Everyone
5. Compare Campaigns’ Engagement Levels
6. Never Forget to Run a Checklist
7. Understand Your Gmail Audience
8. Personalize Your Checklist for Your Team
9. See How Email Clients Render Code
10. Easily Organize Your Data for the Team and Share Results

1. Improve Subscriber Segmentation

Email marketers rely on data to be able to deliver the right emails, at the right time, to the right subscribers—but many marketers say they have limited access to the data they need to judge campaign performance. At Litmus, we’ve made collecting important subscriber data easy with Email Analytics. Easily measure engagement levels, which email clients and devices your subscribers use, and where in the world they’re opening your email. But what can you do with the data after you’ve collected it?

To constantly improve your campaigns with better personalization and targeting, you need a deep understanding of what messages resonate with and truly engage your audience to drive action—and which don’t. That’s why focusing on email analytics and campaign insights is key.

Fill in the gaps of your subscriber data by combining Email Analytics reporting with your email service provider’s metrics. When you export individual-level data from Email Analytics, you’ll be able to see exactly who your most-engaged subscribers are, the email client and device they’re using, which city they open your email in, and more—and then use that data to send more targeted, high-performing emails.

Use this enhanced analysis to improve your subscriber segmentation. Litmus customer Altos used Email Analytics data for one of their clients to improve their open rates:

Litmus Email Analytics allowed us to pivot the client’s email strategy based on engagement data and create more effective emails. As a result, they saw a 35% increase in open rates.

~Joe Savitch, Marketing Manager, Altos

Get more inspiration on how to use Email Analytics data to power segmentation here.

Email Analytics insights aren’t just valuable for email segmentation though, they can only help you streamline your email coding and testing process. Since you’re able to know which email clients and devices your subscribers are using, you can leverage that data to focus your coding and QA efforts. Enter: Email Client Recommendations in Litmus Checklist. With this new feature, you can get live insights on what email clients your subscribers are using so you can focus your attention on the email previews that matter most to your audience. If none of your subscribers use older versions of Outlook, don’t focus your attention there—focus instead on the most popular email clients for your audience.

2. Quickly Recapture Email Previews

On occasion, you may need to manually reload a single email preview in either Checklist or Builder. Rather than reloading all the previews, simply hit “R” on your keyboard when you’re viewing the email preview you want to recapture. Magic.

3. Easily Run Spam Tests Via Your ESP

Running a Spam Test by sending to Litmus from your ESP is the most accurate way to identify issues that could keep you from the inbox. However, some ESPs have issues with sending a test email to a large number of individual email addresses.

If you have this issue, split up the list of test email addresses required for a Spam Test into two or three chunks. Send to each of these chunks within five minutes of each other to ensure your Spam Test appears in your account.

Or, to save even more time, use one of our handy ESP integrations for Spam Testing and make starting a new Spam Test fast and easy.

Make it to the inbox, not the spam folder Identify issues that might keep you from the inbox and get actionable help for how to fix them with Litmus Spam Testing. Try Litmus free →

4. Ensure Your Email Design is Accessible to Everyone

Creating accessible emails should be a goal for all email marketers. After all, a more accessible email means it can be viewed by a larger audience.

A common challenge in accessibility is creating designs suitable for people who suffer from color blindness. Color blindness is the decreased ability to see color or differences in color, and approximately 4.5% of the entire population is affected by it.

Color Contrast Checker is an easy-to-use tool to check the contrast levels between the text and background color of your email design. Litmus’ Email Previews also has a color blind simulator preview, where you can see what your email design as a whole may look like to a subscriber with color blindness.

To test your email’s rendering for color blindness, go to “Choose email clients” in Checklist or Builder and select “Color Blindness.”

In the past few years, screen readers have also been on the rise. Many people, with or without disabilities, rely on screen readers and the underlying software that translates the interface and content seen on a screen into audio, allowing low-vision and blind users to use modern devices.

That’s why we’ve integrated NVDA, a leading open-source screen reader technology developed by NV Access that over 100,000 people rely on to consume digital content, into Litmus Checklist. Our screen reader integration provides an audio recording you can listen to before you send to ensure subscribers using screen readers will have a great experience.

5. Compare Campaigns’ Engagement Levels

Comparing and analyzing how different email campaigns perform is one step towards optimizing the overall performance of your campaigns. By learning which campaigns are generating higher levels of engagement from your subscribers, you’ll be able to craft emails that are more relevant to them.

Email Analytics gives you the ability to compare campaigns and get a visual representation of the data you’re comparing.

Plus, with our aggregated reporting, you can quickly identify top-performing email campaigns in a single view. You can sort your view by opens to see those top performers, or select specific campaigns to see the performance of your emails within a specific date range.

These charts come in handy if you need to quickly present to stakeholders, clients, or your boss how different campaigns have performed. If you like to dig into the numbers behind the data, there’s also the option to export the comparison data as a CSV file.

6. Never Forget to Run a Checklist

Litmus Checklist is designed to help you reduce errors, improve production processes, and decrease turnaround time—but only if you remember to run a Checklist with every send!

Ensure you never forget to run a Checklist by adding your unique Checklist email address to the test list you typically use to send email tests from your ESP.

7. Understand Your Gmail Audience

Using Email Analytics, you can identify how large your Gmail POP/IMAP account audience is. That’s because Email Analytics’ data is collected at an individual level.

To do this:

• Export your campaign data to a CSV file.
• Select all opens from a Gmail client, and identify the number of non @gmail.com email addresses used to open the campaign.

This will give you an idea of the total number and percentage of POP/IMAP users you may have for your audience, and if this is a user base you want to support moving forward. Emails in Gmail render differently depending on if the user is using Gmail with an @gmail address versus a POP/IMAP account. Learn everything you need to know about Gmail rendering in our webinar recording.

8. Personalize Your Checklist for Your Team

We understand that every organization and team has their own checklist to ensure every aspect of the email is correct before send. Which is why we built Custom Checklists, available on Litmus Enterprise accounts.

A Custom Checklist gives you, your team, and/or your clients the ability to add custom rules, lists, approvals, and production notes to each Litmus Checklist you run. You can even see when and who completed each item, giving you total clarity on every step of your email workflow.

9. See How Email Clients Render Code

Litmus Email Previews shows how different email clients render your email. But did you know you can also see how an email client is rendering your email code?

Processed HTML in Litmus Builder makes troubleshooting emails easier than ever, showing what each email client actually processed your email markup into. This makes it easier than ever to pinpoint and diagnose rendering issues. Plus, you can use it with Grid View to spot the issues fast.

10. Easily Organize Your Data for the Team and Share Results

Improve your email workflow by reducing the time spent searching for the right Email Analytics report or Spam Test. Use tags in Checklist, Email Analytics, and Spam Testing to organize your Litmus reports.

For example, attach the tag “halloween” to all your Halloween-themed promotional campaigns and spend less time searching for them in your reports listing. You can use any tag you want to identify your campaigns. We recommend choosing a tag naming convention and applying that across Checklist, Email Analytics, and Spam Testing.

Plus, you can easily generate a shareable link at any part of Litmus—Builder, Proof, Checklist, or Analytics—to keep your team in the loop without adding them as a user to your account.

Share your Litmus power-user tips in the comments below—we’d love to hear how you use Litmus!

Want more resources like this?

Subscribe to Litmus Weekly to get your weekly dose of email inspiration, tips, and tricks, right in your inbox.

The post 10 Litmus Power-User Tips to Make You a Better Email Marketer appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Sending great email isn’t easy. But sending great email at scale is a whole different challenge. How do you set up your program to handle more—and more complex—campaigns, all while keeping your brand voice and email quality consistent?

Experts from Litmus and Salesforce sat down to discuss the three elements of a scalable email program: people, processes, and tools. You can watch the full webinar on-demand here, but this post marks the first in a series breaking down the best tips for scaling your email team. Today, the focus is on the people within your email program.

What it Takes to Scale Your Email Program In this on-demand webinar, experts from Litmus and Salesforce share the secrets to growing your email program the right way. Watch our webinar →

Scaling the human side of your email program

Creating and managing a team of email experts is no small feat, and it can be particularly tricky during times of change or growth. On one end of the spectrum, you may be juggling a lot of projects and responsibilities with a small team. Or, you could be facing inefficient workflows or scattered communication with a large crew.

No matter how many email team members you have or what your current workload is like, knowing how to effectively scale your department is a valuable skill. Auditing your team structure and strategy also helps your existing department work more efficiently, making it easier for them to produce revenue-driving campaigns each day. 

People = Team + Skills

The success of your people lies in two elements—your team and their skills. The first component is all about selecting the right people and organizing them effectively, while the second element focuses on their growth within your organization. Let’s dive in. 

Finding the right people for the job: Generalist vs. specialist vs. leader

A lot goes into creating a single email. So much so that 53% of teams spend two weeks or more to get a single campaign ready to send. Having a smaller email program doesn’t magically make the all-important steps of designing, coding, and testing go away, so these teams are usually filled with generalists. Our research found that a majority of an email team’s responsibilities are focused on email coding and development, while email strategy and design are also common tasks.

You’ll get to a point during team expansion where your attention will likely shift to specialists. Hiring people who can go all-in on a single function, such as design or coding, helps them deepen their skills and knowledge to provide better work, faster. By hiring or training specialists, you relieve email team members of constantly having to switch gears or learn a little about a lot of topics.

Whether you want to add more generalists or specialists to your team, there’s one crucial element that successful organizations have: a leader. Leadership sets expectations and defines rules so everyone can focus their attention and efforts on what matters.

How to get it right: If you’re trying to decide if you need to train or hire a generalist or specialist, your first step is identifying the areas where your team feels overwhelmed.

Do they feel there’s not enough time to work on strategy or analyze post-send results? Are there new designs or coding skills you’d like to implement, but you don’t have anyone on your team who can execute those ideas? How do you think your needs will evolve in the coming year? Do you need a strong leader who can help everyone work in the same direction?

All of these questions will help you identify gaps in your team. You can also talk to your team about their current strengths or preferred tasks, and whether or not they’d like to be a specialist in that area in the future. When it’s time to hire a new team member, make sure you set clear expectations in your job description.

Organizing your team for success

Even the most talented individuals can’t do their best work if they’re part of a broken system. That’s why a crucial part of scaling your program is finding an organizational structure that sets your team and work up for success. But what does the perfect team structure look like? As it often does, the answer is “it depends.” Each company is different, and you may need different answers as you evolve.

Centralized vs. decentralized email organizations

Our 2019 State of Email Survey looked at how different companies organize their email teams, and the good news is you’ve got options.

Smaller companies tend to choose a centralized team structure, where a single group handles all email strategy, writing, and design. Communication is a bit easier when you’re working in a small group. Plus, when all of the strategy, writing, and designing comes from the same group, you end up with more cohesive campaigns across segments. When done right, a centralized email organization can also be a well-oiled machine, creating a repeatable process that utilizes different team members’ strengths. When centralized teams become too large, though, there’s a risk of slowing down your workflow. That’s why, as organizations grow, we tend to see a shift away from centralized structures.

Large or multi-national organizations are more likely to opt for decentralized teams, where entire email units are grouped by location, product line, division, etc. Decentralized teams can be more agile around the needs of their unique customers, but they can also create a fragmented brand experience. Even smaller companies that have traditionally worked as a centralized unit can face some of the decentralized challenges if they enlist the help of freelancers and agencies or have a remote workforce.

How to get it right: There are a few different ways you can organize your team, so what’s the best option for you? If your company has less than 100 employees, it might make the most sense to choose a centralized team structure for simpler workflows and communication.

In reality, our research found that centralized teams didn’t fall out of the majority until a company hit 10,000 or more employees. If you’re in a large company or growing with the help of freelancers, you need to pay even closer attention to your processes. Regular check-ins on goals, user personas, brand guidelines, and insights help disjointed teams work as a cohesive unit.

For a deep-dive into centralized and decentralized email teams—and the pros and cons that come with each set-up—read our blog post on organizing email teams.

Aligning on the customer

Want to start making your team more effective starting today? Schedule time for everyone to review how your email program can align with the customer and overall business strategy.

Who are your target customers, and what are their motivators? What brand touch points will they have across other channels? Are your current campaigns based on customer-centric journeys? Without a clear and shared understanding of the customer and email’s role in their journey, it’s tough to make emails that hit the target.

How to get it right: First, assess your current email strategy and any documentation about the customer. If you don’t have a single source of truth for email marketers to learn from, it’s a great time to create one. If you do have a strategy around customer success through email, do all team members know and reference it? 

Leveling up with skills and knowledge

Scaling a capable email team isn’t just about hiring the right mix of people, it’s also about investing to help them grow in their role. By empowering your current team with new skills, you may be able to get more and different work done without having to expand payroll just yet. 

Allow room for experimentation

Provide your team with the room to mix up the day-to-day tasks with projects that break the routine. This can be a set of A/B tests, experiments with new coding or design techniques, or a chance to design a one-off email that’s different from your standard template. Every experiment—successful or not—provides an opportunity for your team to be challenged and learn.

Invest in training 

Email is continually evolving, which means that learning in your email team should never stop. Training can help your current people grow into more specialist roles, or ensure new hires stay on the cutting edge. Here are a few ways you can invest in training:

• Give your team the time to research email marketing trends and best practices. 
• Set aside a budget for your team to attend conferences, take online courses, or get certifications.
• Take advantage of free online learning opportunities like webinars or Salesforce Trailhead.

The people on your email team are the everyday marketing heroes who help deliver great customer experiences, campaign after campaign. The human element of efficiently scaling your email program can also be the trickiest, since there’s more to team management than choosing the right integration or tool.

Some of the best things you can do to effectively scale your team is focus on alignment, collaboration, and learning. Getting the foundation of your team right will pay dividends in the long run.

If you feel you’ve gotten off to a rocky start in your scaling efforts or aren’t sure where to start, you’re in good hands. In the next post in this series on scaling your email team, we’ll look at your processes and tools. Stay tuned!

The post How to Successfully Scale Your Email Team, Part 1: People appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

Seeing code spill out in front of you can feel incredibly intimidating, and sometimes frustrating. I promise you, from marketer to marketer, that it’s way easier than it looks. Plus, being able to navigate email HTML is an incredibly valuable skill. In our email code basics series, we’ll teach you the email HTML fundamentals you need to know to become more comfortable with email code.

In our last post, we covered how you can navigate your email code to get up to speed on how to update links or make quick copy changes. But what about images?

Images are the backbone of many high-performing emails. But, with ever-increasing complexity and various file types, sizes, accessibility, and load time to consider, it can overwhelm even the most skilled marketer.

In this article, we’ll touch on some of the most common ways to add images to your email and go over the basics to make sure your subscribers have a great experience. If you’re looking for a deep dive on images, check out these guides:

• Ultimate Guide to Background Images in Email
• A Guide to Animated GIFs in Email
• Using Images in HTML Email

You can easily follow along with the topics covered in this guide, so go ahead and open an email in Litmus Builder and we’ll get started!

Prepare your image

Before you can add your image to your email, make sure it’s set up for success. First, make sure the image you’re using is a good file type and size for email. Large file sizes will slow down your loading time, decreasing your overall conversions and engagement, so be sure you’re using a lightweight image that loads quickly.

Insert your image

Find where you want to add the image in your code—if you’re using Litmus Builder, flip on Grid View to click where you’d want an image to appear and then click into the code view. When you’ve found the perfect spot, use the <img> tag to add in your image, but replace the URL here with a direct link to your image.

If you’re not sure what a direct link is, look out for the end of the file name, it should end with an image file type like “.png,” “.jpg,” or “.gif.” Links to folders or HTML won’t work here, it needs to point directly to the image you’re adding to your email.

<img src="img-url.jpg" />

That’s it! Once you add in your tag, your image will show in the preview pane if you’re in Litmus Builder.

Curious where you can host your images? Most ESPs have a file hosting system where you can upload your images and use those public URLs for the image source in your email, so be sure to check your ESP first. If your ESP does not provide image file hosting, consider using Amazon’s AWS or your own website’s FTP server for image hosting.

Find the right dimensions

It’s best to use an image that’s twice the size of the space you’d like to insert your image so it looks great on all monitors and there’s no pixelation or blurriness. Adjust the width and height of your images by adding in a modifier to your <img> tag you built in the previous step. It will look something like this:

<img src="img-url.jpg" width="400" height="100" />

Adjust the values of the width and height depending on whatever makes sense for your email. You can play with these values and see how it looks by making changes, then clicking into the preview pane in Builder to see them update.

Add ALT text

ALT text describes an image so those who have images disabled in their email client or rely on a screen reader can easily read your email. For example, if we have an image of a promotion offering 20% off, adding some ALT text describing the offer makes your reader aware of the offer even if they can’t see images for any reason.

<img src=”img-url.jpg” width=”400” height=”100” alt=”20% off all seeds” />

The best ALT text is descriptive, succinct, and has the same intention as your image. If you run your email through Litmus Checklist before you send, we’ll flag missing ALT text so you can easily go in and update it. Now you don’t even have to check with a developer!

Swap images

Changed your mind on that one image?  You’ve got two options:

1. Just the same as creating a new image, you can replace the URL that points to your image with a new one. This will keep all your dimensions, your ALT text, or whatever else might help style your image and just update the image content itself.

Take the current image tag and look for the file path:

<img src=”img-url.jpg” width=”400” height=”100” alt=”20% off all seeds” />

Replace the path with your new image path:

<img src=”updatedimg-url.jpg” width=”400” height=”100” alt=”20% off all seeds” />

2. Depending on where your image is hosted, you could also upload a new image with the exact same name to the same location. That way, you don’t need to touch the code at all to update your email’s image.

Picture-perfect email

Now that you’ve got the power to update and modify images, use that power wisely! Images in email can go wrong quickly. Heavy files that take ages to load, using images for your entire email, or foregoing accessibility for design can create messy subscriber experiences.

Here’s some quick best practices to keep in mind as you build your image library:

• Keep files light and sweet, under 1MB is best and the smaller the better (Litmus Checklist checks your load time, so don’t fret if you don’t know every single image size.)
• Add alternative text to make your email legible and accessible even if images aren’t visible.
• Don’t send image-only emails and make sure your email has live text. It can be tempting to design an entire email using an image, but that can hurt engagement and conversions with long load times and poor experiences for those who have images disabled.

Need help on a specific newbie code question? Let us know what you’d like to see next in this series. No question is too basic!

_________________________________

Learn more about images in email:

• Why You Shouldn’t Send Image-Only Emails
• A Guide to Animated GIFs in Email 
• Understanding Retina Images in HTML Email
• PNG, GIF, or JPEG? Which is the Best Image Format for Email? 
• Animated GIFs in Email: 10 Tips for Keeping File Sizes Small 
• The Ultimate Guide to Background Images in Email
• Animated PNGs in Email: An Alternative to GIFs?

The post The 102 of Email Code: Working with Images appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..

One of my favorite parts about attending Litmus Live is learning from gifted email marketers willing to get on stage and share their ideas, tips, and insights. I also wonder, after their presentation, how those topics evolve: what’s happened since their session that would be relevant to current times and changed since they stepped off stage?

I’m excited to kick off a new way to hear from our past presenters with Litmus Live Interviews. Each month, we’ll be connecting for a catch-up visit to see what’s changed from their topics and find new ideas or pieces of advice. We’ll be adding interviews here on the blog, recorded sessions on the Litmus Live Everywhere site, and more.

COVID-19, natural disasters, local emergencies: How to pivot your email program around unplanned events

With COVID-19 still being top of mind for marketers around the world, I was wondering about strategies that companies can take when it comes to communicating with their subscribers around unplanned events, be it a global pandemic, natural disaster, or even things like supply chain disruptions.

I sat down with Shreyas Mecheri, who presented at Litmus Live Boston in 2019 about email marketing during natural disasters. Shreyas works at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, and with a global subscriber base she’s well-versed in needing to be on top of situations for her audience at any given time. Her presentation featured tons of ways to be an empathetic sender in times of crisis, and many of these tips can apply to plans and strategies for all organizations. In our chat, she mentioned one thing that rings true globally:

You can watch Shreyas’s entire presentation from Litmus Live 2019 below:

As marketers, we need to shift our messaging for any number of unplanned reasons – natural disasters and pandemics are just a couple of examples. How do you craft messaging that informs your customers without sounding insincere?

Shreyas: Such situations are extremely emotional, and it is hard for people in distress to verbalize their needs. Simple choices are best, so ask this of yourself: does the customer need comfort or space? Do you have useful, critical, relevant, helpful information that will comfort them now? If not, hold off your emails until your customers have had some breathing room and may actually want to read them.

In my talk, I had shared a timeline for planning around such events—there are messages that can help people prepare for, during, and after. Mapping out your messages like that and possibly developing new offerings around these timelines is a good idea.

And don’t forget those automated journeys—take a good look at what may need to be paused or adjusted during such times.

How has your company changed its content and sending strategy during this global pandemic?

Shreyas: Our strategy has been tailored for the global markets we operate in. We lead with what is most urgent and useful; in our case, that is changes in exam testing schedules for students, important resources and legislative news to enable our members to support their clients, and new ways of working. We also amplified our content formats, with quick video updates from our leadership published at a higher frequency than usual and chat features to support technical questions. We supplemented our print magazines with an email because of the uncertainty in knowing where and when our members would be receiving their print mail.

One of the easiest ways to pivot for unplanned circumstances is to have a plan in place long before you need it. What items would be a good idea for companies to make sure are covered?

Shreyas: It’s the basics: what you will send when to whom, and how. The how must cover scenario planning for your email operations because it’s quite likely your own team will be working through tough situations.

If only a certain subset of a subscriber list is affected, what changes should someone consider making to their segmentation to help decide when to send an email?

Shreyas: Ideally, you want to geographically target your messages by only sending to affected groups or suppressing them from your lists, depending on the situation. Over time you would have collected location information from your email recipients, but if you don’t have this, try inferring their location based on where they opened the email (information your email service provider may have or by using a tool like Litmus Email Analytics) or using creative solutions like Live Images which use the same concept, looking at the IP address for where the email was opened.

What tips do you have for organizations that had paused their messaging plans? How would you recommend getting back into the swing of things?

Shreyas: Take the long view. Holding off unless you have something of value to communicate will be better in the long run. You will need to make adjustments in your goals, but it will be worth it. Whether it is through a quick squad, customer service, or social listening, stay connected with your audience as much as possible. Use the time to plan for what you can do now to email about later. Are there sincere social good activities you can engage in now and mention in your future emails to build brand loyalty? Does the current situation lead to future opportunities that you should plan for now?

When you are ready to start emailing, put geo-targeting and other data to use. For example, we heard from our teams in certain countries in Asia that business was slowly coming back. So, it was appropriate for me to send a promotional email that did not rise to the level of urgency that we used for UK and US audiences. We’re not all in the same boat, and for some subscribers it’s not insensitive to send an email.

What’s an example of an email you’ve received recently that is related to the current pandemic, and what made that message resonate with you?

Shreyas: I am a WW (WeightWatchers) member and was impressed by the quick pivots and relevant messaging that has come through their emails. They took their physical weekly meetings to Zoom and immediately started “health from home” focused content, weaving in humor and messaging from their communities in their emails. The most thoughtful message was one where they acknowledged what an impact the pandemic has on members’ lives and recommended members consider a shift from weight loss to weight maintenance where appropriate. This is a change to the core of the program but it took reality head on and felt sincere.

I really enjoyed catching up with Shreyas and hearing a bit on how AICPA has maintained trust and relevancy with their customers and her tips for staying ahead of what’s to come (even though none of us can predict what exactly that might be). If you’re looking to start or update a process for the unplanned events that will certainly come up in the future, you’ll definitely want to review Shreyas’ presentation.

If you’re looking for more insights on how to adjust your email program during the global health pandemic, check out these resources:

• Genuine, Empathetic, and Subscriber-Centric: 5 Examples of Great Email Communication During COVID-19
• 6 Tips on Sending Effective Email During a Crisis
• On-Demand Webinar: Best Practices for Email Marketing During a Crisis 
• Leading Email Marketing Through Change 
• 5 Tips for Increasing Customer Retention with Email Marketing

The post The Art of Adjusting Your Email Program in Uncertain Times: An Interview with Shreyas Mecheri appeared first on Litmus Software, Inc..