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.
- Improve Subscriber Segmentation
- Quickly Recapture Email Previews
- Easily Run Spam Tests Via Your ESP
- Ensure Your Email Design is Accessible to Everyone
- Compare Campaigns’ Engagement Levels
- Never Forget to Run a Checklist
- Understand Your Gmail Audience
- Personalize Your Checklist for Your Team
- See How Email Clients Render Code
- 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 folderIdentify 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!
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