Building emails for an email company whose primary audience is email marketers is… tough.
Email marketers have incredibly high standards when it comes to the emails that land in their inbox. Sure, email clients don’t make it easy with over 300,000 potential email renderings and email client updates that can happen on average every 1.2 days. But we’re up for that challenge at Litmus.
How we stay on top of 120+ emails and email templates
How does the Litmus team keep tabs on how their critical emails and email templates display?
Every quarter, we test every single email template in our Litmus Design Library using Previews & QA to ensure there are no critical issues. Our focus here is to ensure that every single email and email template still displays (or renders) as expected in every email client and device.
While this quarterly task is invaluable in helping us maintain our email templates, it doesn’t help us react quickly to unexpected and ad hoc email client updates and changes.
Litmus Email Guardian does.
By ensuring every email and email template is monitored by Email Guardian, we no longer have to worry about email client updates and how they’ll impact our emails. Litmus Email Guardian helps us protect our emails and ensure our subscribers have the best possible experience of Litmus in their inbox.
Where does Litmus Email Guardian fit in the email workflow?
While the email workflow our team has adopted is well-defined, it’s flexible enough to be able to adapt when new technology is available which can help us be more efficient. It’s our opinion that email workflows should be continually reviewed and updated to best support the changing needs of the team.
We use Litmus throughout the email workflow, from building to QA—and even proofing. Rather than starting to monitor an email using Email Guardian when an email is first created, we’ve chosen to add newly created emails and email templates to Email Guardian after the email has been proofed and approved.
At this point in the email workflow, the email is fully QA’d and proofed by all stakeholders, meaning it’ll be the version of the email we’ll be sending and what our subscribers will receive. This helps ensure Email Guardian isn’t monitoring an email that’s a work-in-progress—emails aren’t always built, QA’d, and proofed in a single day.
It’s easy to add this step to our workflow because it’s literally a single button press within our Previews & QA checklist! And with that single click, we have collective peace of mind that if email clients were to update unexpectedly and impact how emails are displayed, Email Guardian is keeping a watchful eye on our emails—and if something does change, we’ll be notified.
Set it—and forget it. Yes, really
Using Email Guardian is probably the only part of email marketing you can set and forget. Primarily because we can monitor an unlimited number of emails—and we have a lot of emails and email templates to keep an eye on! Plus, using Email Guardian doesn’t eat into monthly preview allowances. That’s called winning!
Once Email Guardian is monitoring our emails, when a change is detected, we’re notified of that change via email. From that email, it’s a single click to see exactly what’s changed with a swishy before-and-after slider!
From there, we’ll review the change detected. If it will impact upcoming email campaigns, we’ll prioritize updating the email to fix the issue detected.
We’re not the only ones taking advantage of Email Guardian’s ability to give email marketers peace of mind:
We have journey emails that are sent out automatically when visitors complete a website inquiry to learn more about a home and also for our Sun Outdoors welcome and pre-stay arrival emails. With Litmus Email Guardian, I’m able to keep a constant pulse on those emails, not having to continually review creative renderings and gain peace of mind that our brand is putting our best foot forward with every send.
Embracing emerging technologies
Your email workflow isn’t—and should never be—static. If it were to remain static, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to adapt it to new technologies that can help make your email workflow more efficient.
Incorporating Email Guardian into our email workflows has:
- Given us more visibility into how our emails render—without any extra work
- Helped us keep a watchful eye on our enormous library of emails and templates
- Empowered us to feel prepared for when email clients make unexpected changes
Email Guardian is there when you can’t be
Broken emails mean less conversions. (Yikes.) Prevent email errors and protect your brand reputation with Litmus Email Guardian.
The post How the Litmus Team Uses Email Guardian (and You Can Too!) appeared first on Litmus.
