Email marketing learnings from Litmus Live

Jay headed to Litmus Live - the email conference from Litmus which brings together a selection of the top email marketing professionals in the world for workshops, talks and networking. Covering everything from email strategy, process, design, and development the conference was packed full of inspiration, tackling topics like data-driven design, advanced personalisation, improved workflows, and more. Jay went to bring his learnings back to the rest of the team and to identify ways we can continue to stay right at the top of the email marketing game by bringing the latest ideas and insight from the cutting edge of the industry to our clients. Here are Jay's top learnings from Litmus Live:

1. The email renaissance is alive and kicking.

One of the key themes to kick off the conference was how, over the past five years, email marketing has come full circle. As a marketing channel, it's faced fierce competition from the rise of social advertising but is now in a place where it's become more relevant than ever before. Email is undergoing a huge resurgence and, with many databases now in much better shape thanks to GDPR, subscribers welcome the fact the brands they want to hear from come straight to their inbox. What's more, with ever evolving advances in design and development, the power of email marketing looks set to keep on growing. ‍

2. Interactivity in email will soon be common place...

On the note of advances in development, interactivity within email will be widely possible in the not too distant future. Whether it's responding to surveys, filling in forms, adding hover effects and even using sliders, 2018 has seen huge advances in making email more interactive. Increasingly, more email clients are now supporting this interactivity which is a big step forward in the growth of interactive emails.

3. ...but don't make your emails work too hard.

However, it's worth keeping in mind that sometimes we can try and make email work too hard. While getting people to interact and engage within an email can be incredible useful in some instances, if your primary goal is to bring the user into your website then simple, well designed and well written emails with one call to action will often be your best bet. ‍

4. Sentiment scoring gives instant feedback

We all want to know how well our emails are performing and there's a number of ways we can do that from the simple things like measuring open and click through rates to the more advanced methods like measuring customer spend from an email campaign with ecommerce tracking. But what if you could get immediate feedback on whether your customers actually like you're email? In her talk at the conference, Leonie Jonker, explained how by including sentiment scoring, such as thumbs up or thumbs down, you are able to gain valuable feedback on the quality of your email campaigns or even specific stories. This insight gives the ability to know what content your customers like and to serve up more of it to them. ‍

5. Make sure your emails are helpful

Jonathan Pay, a man who describes himself as the world's first second-generation email marketer, explained the psychology of creating high performance emails, built on the premise that "being helpful really does help.

If someone is giving you their email address then, once you begin emailing them, you're essentially delivering on that contract and so you should treat your database with respect.

Jonathan also explained there are four different types of reader which fall into the categories of: competitive, methodical, spontaneous, and humanistic. He says, the formula for writing winning emails, is striking a tone which will resonate with all four types of this reader. This can seem a bit daunting but a great place to start is to answer the questions of "what, when, why, who, and how."

Of course, no email conference in 2018 would be complete without a mention for GDPR and, while it wasn't dwelt on for too long, there was a fascinating stat that May 24th 2018 saw a 27% increase in sending of emails compared to Black Friday in 2017! ‍ If you have any questions about anything we've covered here please let us know or if you'd simply like to find out a bit more about how email marketing can benefit your business we'd love to hear from you.