Help Us Fuel Email Design Research – Litmus

Our State of Email reports have historically relied on the generous knowledge-sharing of the email community. This exchange of insights not only benefits individual email marketers in their professional development but also contributes to the collective improvement of the field.

As email professionals, we understand the value of sharing our experiences and techniques with one another, and the 2023 State of Email Design survey is one of the ways to foster this collaborative spirit. This is one of my favorite aspects of the email geek community—one that has stuck with me—which I recount below.

Once upon an email…

When I started in the email marketing world almost 12 years ago in 2011, I knew nothing. I had a couple of design jobs on my resume, had learned enough HTML to build a very old-fashioned webpage, and had garnered enough CSS to fancify a MySpace profile. I really didn’t know anything about the specifics of design and development for email or the craft of email marketing itself.

When confronted with this fascinating and occasionally stupefying email beast, I turned curious, as is the reaction of so many of us who’ve stuck around in this industry. I learned what I could from the people I worked with, then turned my gaze outward and started devouring all the blog posts I could find. I recall I spent a lot of time perusing Litmus Community. Even then, though, I didn’t have any real sense of how other people in the industry worked. 

Then in 2016, I spoke at my first Litmus Live and it was intoxicating for me. The first time I’d really spent time among peers in the industry and heard how they approached this work, the failures, and successes. My first time connecting with fellow email geeks. It was heady; I was hooked. 

It was at that event that I discovered that there were no real email grownups who held all the answers, just this delightful, motley group of us all constantly learning from one another. All of us trying to solve the same problems. This is what cherish about our community.

Keep the spirit of knowledge-sharing alive

The little things we figure out—optimizing images, creating accessibility-friendly color palettes, finding helpful collaborative proofing tools—that may not seem noteworthy to ourselves, when shared with others can be game-changing. This is why surveys like the 2023 State of Email Design survey feel so important to me, as a way of gathering up all these personal practices and team processes so that we can then share them with all of you.

I hope you’ll consider taking the survey—I know we can all benefit from what you have to offer. 

Originally published on February 3, 2023. Last updated March 23, 2023.