TGWhat have you changed since TEDC14?
It’s been about a week since TEDC14, enough time for me to reflect and think about how it all applies to my work. Here are few changes I’ve begun to make:
I’m all in with Sublime Text. Previously I used Dreamweaver, Sublime, Coda, or whatever was on the computer I was using. After seeing the custom setups and time-savers a few TEDC folks had, I decided to invest in one editor.
I’m making my own version of Jay and Megan’s email planner. Email planning, approving, and reporting are pain points for me.
I started looking into building emails using a static site generator. I’m not sure how much this will benefit the types of emails I work on, so it’s a pet project for now.
I’m paying more attention to which links people are clicking. I want to know how many people scroll (especially on mobile), which will inform my ongoing designs.
I don’t purchase as many mailing lists as I used to. Kidding… just kidding.
I also use Litmus Builder (of course) but since I work on websites and apps too, it doesn’t make sense for that my editor for everything.
Over to you: what have you started looking into since TEDC?
My colleague and I just got done presenting a deck to our colleagues in the marketing department here, and then the UX department wanted some as well so we did it again. There are SO many takeaways for my team, we basically haven't shut up about it all. As for concrete stuff, we're going to be hitting data collection hard, building new, better-coded templates, starting a local meetup for email marketers, etc. There's just a ton of stuff to implement, some of it having to do with the list-pulls and send-time optimization. On the creative side, it's all about focusing on what we're already doing and hitting the next level. We were inspired to kick our game up a notch, to be sure.
An email meetup, nice!
I'm giving a presentation on Thursday to the Marketing team here, after which the implementation will begin...
I'm going to start with the Quick Wins of: bulletproof buttons, refining our styled ALT text, and persuading our email team that a Litmus account is a good investment.
I am also going to be asking for more demographic and metric information in order to see if our older audience is ready for responsive email (50% mobile rate is the tipping point for us), as well as pushing to simplify our layouts and take on board the great feedback I got during the first email optimization session.
You guys got me using PowerPoint LOL... thank goodness for their templates, designing with that software is so lame!
Also, I'm fascinated by Grunt - but not sure where to start with it? Any suggestions?
I haven't used grunt for email, but here are two things I've seen recently:
https://medium.com/p/32d607879082
http://www.leemunroe.com/email-design-workflow/
By Sublime Text you mean Builder, right?
Aside from purchasing more lists and moving to an all-JPEG format for my emails, I'll most likely be switching my emails over to using the SpongeBlast™ approach to coding. I plan on playing round more with process and tools stuff just so I can test them out. My personal emails don't really warrant a huge process, but it'd be nice to see what the fuss about so that I can write and talk about it in a more educated manner.
I think my biggest takeaway has just been a renewed sense of enthusiasm for email. Just being in the same place with 500 like-minded people helped validate the work we do at Litmus and beyond, and it's gotten me pumped up to work on more side projects with email.
The biggest change though? I don't have to delve into Keynote or PowerPoint for the foreseeable future.
Powerpoint wasn't so bad, was it Jason?? ;-)
Don't get me started, Jay. Too Soon.
Got any examples of some custom set ups for Sublime? I've downloaded it, but honestly don't know where to begin customising it to make the most out of it. Currently using Adobe's Brackets, which is a similar affair, in that you download plugins to make it what you want it to be.
I don't have any examples yet, Jaina. I'm just starting to configure the basics and am looking for snippets. Nothing special about Sublime, per se, but it's cheap (Dreamwaver), cross platform (Coda), stable, and works without Internet (Litmus Builder).
I've found this guide helpful in the past.
http://plausiblethought.net/my-sublime-text-setup/
The main things I rely on are the Package Control for downloading new plugins and Emmet for quickly writing code. Don't do much email in there these days (I
Builder), but for website stuff Emmet is amazing. I imagine it's just as useful for table-based coding, too.
Using bullet proof buttons. Trying to establish needed data for ctr, open rate, and conversion rate - post-mortum to have closed loop marketing. Implementing A/B testing and low and high commitment ctas.
Best. Conference. Ever.