Litmus Live 2017

This is a short account of my experiences at Litmus Live 2017 – one of the biggest email conferences in the world. I packed my bags and flew to London for an exciting time of email shenanigans. My mission: To speak with leaders and innovators on their field of expertise and learn even more about the art of making incredible emails.

As a developer, I’m driven towards everything new and innovative with emails. Therefore, the sessions I attended mainly belonged to the “Design and Developer” track. Not all equally exciting, but the takeaways were far greater than I could have hoped for. In all briefness: I’m impressed with the pioneers within email development.

The single most impressive piece of technology that I want to tell you about, is the ability to have webforms within emails. Cyrill Gross, Partner at Mayoris showed how they successfully implemented working webforms within emails. His main points revolved around the security and support in email clients – something that apparently is pretty well supported in the top percentage of email clients.

This is definitively something that the Agillic team will be able to further work with. Going forward, I could definitely see us implementing web forms into emails if all tests pan out successfully. This could make a lot of flows much easier for the recipient, assisting to gather more data on your recipients.

I took a quick peek into the Marketing sessions as I listened in on a case study from a company called Phrasee. The company had made the study to test how we as consumers respond to various kinds of subject lines. Through the use of eye-tracking software, they gained insights into where and when our brain pauses when reading. Does emojicons catch our eye? Is exclamation points useful for creating attention? As it turned out, there really is no way of making the perfect subject line. Short term, you may achieve more engagement if you surprise your recipients with different subject lines, but once a recipient is used to the wording, punctuation and use of emojis the engagement tends to drop again.

So, the learning is still: It’s important to split test your subject line and gain constant insight into what triggers your audience. It’s not a one size fits all.

Have you read our blog? At Agillic, we blog about everything from strategic planning to how to ensure your emails are successful in reaching your recipients. Go have a look at the blog on split testing and get our insights! 

During one of the breaks, I caught up with James Halliday, Director of Partnerships at Litmus. I was curious to talk to him about integrations between Litmus and ESPs. James told me that Litmus plans to further improve their integrations to make it even easier to integrate Litmus Email Previews within your email platform. Bringing Litmus testing to users of software such as Agillic’s will be easier than ever before. I am really excited about this opportunity and will definitely be checking up on it.

During the two-day program, I got to listen to many inspiring talks and speakers. One of the talks that really stuck with me was a talk on how to incorporate accessibility into your emails. The talk was truly interesting, as it explored the opportunities implementing designs and developmental features towards being more subscriber-friendly. Designing emails that are readable to for example visually impaired subscribers, challenges some of the basic methods of the trade but was a huge inspiration as I am currently working within this field.  

Mark Robbins’ talk was another personal highlight from the conference. His theme was about the future of images within emails – including new formats and extensions for better performance. Presumably, this is not likely to have an enormous impact just yet, but very interesting nonetheless.

If you are looking for more hacks on making your emails stand out in the crowd, I’ve written a little something on how to make your emails pleasurable

The conference was closed by Robert Dawson Scott, Head of Engagement at Scottish Television. His talk was about empowering the content creators instead of managing everything in the marketing team. The premise being that the content creators are the people that know the content best and as such are better equipped to deliver great and relevant content.

Overall, I was genuinely impressed with both speakers and the number of amazing attendees at this year’s conference. The field of emails holds so many hacks and things to do with the design of emails that makes email much more accessible, user-friendly, surprising and up to date.

With all the great experiences from the conference, I am already planning to attend next year. Thanks to Litmus for a great event!