Litmus Live Quiz Challenge #5

Twitter: @jainamistry

To kick things off, here's a story from my pre-Litmus days.

I used to work for a small start-up. Budget was tight and expectations were high. Email marketing wasn't a priority, initially, after our first few campaigns were sent out and the numbers came in, focus shifted and email marketing was put under the spotlight.

Email designs were scrutinised heavily. The CEO wanted the emails to look perfect, everywhere. Especially on the phones/email clients he used. Of course!

It's the classic story of a CEO seeing the company emails on a couple of different devices, and seeing the differences in rendering with his own eyes that helped me get buy-in to get an account with Litmus.

I documented all the benefits, in a Google doc, of using Litmus for the company. The second step was getting the rest of the modestly sized email team on board with the idea of using Litmus in the workflow. It was important to get the rest of the team on board before charging forward with the proposal, as it gave me a few more cheerleaders to talk about just how beneficial Litmus would be to not just one, but all of us.

While the CEO was impressed with being able to preview emails in countless different devices and email clients without having to shell out for an entire device lab, it was Email Analytics that really grabbed his attention. As a new and growing company, we needed insight on our customers—when and where they were opening the emails—all the data!

Previews introduced the conversation of using Litmus, but it was actually another feature of Litmus that sold the CEO on buying Litmus.

+1 Getting buy-in as one of the most important skills I have observed an email marketing manager (or many other roles) to develop. This is because, quite often, the person doing the research is not the decision maker or person with buying power. I follow a general framework for leadership without direct authority:

1. Research (just as you would a paper for university)
2. Try it yourself (get a free demo)
3. Experiment and collect results (if it's a tool that allows some inputs and outputs for free during a limited time, get those outputs)
4. Collect cases where market competitors are doing a similar thing (this can "add momentum" to your case)
5. Estimate rollout impact and cost (and have good financial judgment)
6. Write up results as if you were your manager or CEO making a decision based on your report (or yourself if you are the decision maker and need to audit your thinking)
7. Optional: If you have several leadership layers in your company, may be good to meet with them individually before a group meeting to get that buy-in.

A top-down approval + bottoms-up momentum approach has been my go-to method to get several projects spun up or moving forward. Hope it helps someone else out, too!

@vickymakesstuff

I attended the email design conference around 2 years ago. Luckily, Litmus already had a high reputation with my then manager and director and he already got half the buy in. Using Litmus' convince your boss letter with some editing/personalization advice from our director of talent development, I was able to submit the proposal to him and our finance director. Coming back, I had the confidence to implement progressive enhancements and responsive design to our emails and was then able to ask for Litmus access as a resource through an email with a couple bulleted lists. The request was approved, the only question being: do we need more/a higher plan?

Fast forward a year or so, and I think adding the spam filter testing might be a possible request. With a new manager/team and finance department/processes, stay tuned for how getting buy-in for that goes :) I'm starting with asking a couple departments about spam filter concerns to build a new bulleted list case.

—@pbdesignwizard

@AlonnaJo
Email has always been the monster that we actively avoid in any way possible. The development team dislikes the legacy code needed to provide a good looking, responsive email to multiple email clients. The design team is terrified of trying to digest the large amounts of code they see other than changing an image URL and jumping back to Photoshop.

How did I get buy in? With email, this is simple - show the team how much easier their lives can be. With Litmus, I was able to tell the team and my shareholders that we no longer have to tell our brothers and uncles with different device types to check the email we sent them to see if it looks okay. I showed them the stats provided in the Litmus blog of the importance of designing for mobile. I guided the marketing team through the Litmus checklist to show them how even their subject lines can be tested.

Show your team the facts, what can improve and then take the time to educate them on how it works. Though buy-ins are not always this easy - anything to improve the email creation process is openly accepted! Thank you Litmus for making the beast we call email creation tolerable (and maybe even a little fun)!

@cinaedum

The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is an overall increase in engagement from our subscribers. Better engagement ends with better profits, and that is enough to raise some eyebrows. I was able to help the company I work for by diversifying the coding and proving the design is overall better for our subscribers, and our goals. This was partly accomplished with the ability to utilize Litmus and setting some elevated email marketing standards.

Twitter handle: stef0279

I joined a large Ecommerce company about 9 months ago, that send out emails to UK, Europe and Australia. We build a lot of emails and they all need testing before being sent. The buy-in I introduced was for Litmus. I couldn't believe a company this size was not testing their email campaigns. I created a Business Case for the need for Litmus and that it is actually a money saving product - putting an end to emails that could potential break in various email clients and eventually causing customers to click the unsubscribe link.

My case was approved and we were signed up for a Litmus account not long after. It felt like a great achievement for myself and the company, especially after being told by colleagues I would probably be told no :-)

Mine was actually for using Litmus! I used research and reviews to support my decision of the choice of software along with screenshots of how we would use it on our own email marketing strategy and how this would help the company save time when testing email templates that had been designed by our company.

What was very useful was getting a free trial of Litmus to show to my manager and the Directors exactly what they were paying for and I could easily show them how to use the software during a meeting and how this could help save me coding the email time during testing as well as showing the clients the screenshots from every email client test during the handover process.

Twitter: @emtee

We were searching for a way to get analytics data on emails, and reviewed both Litmus and Email on Acid. Between the free templates (the stamplia partnership), and the easy online interface, plus the week free trial, it helped get your brand in the door. Now it's data we use in everyday decisions.

Twitter: @MikeBlank21

Twitter: @Nicodemaus

At Fathom, we take pride in commitment to delivering excellent results to our clients. This means creating visually appealing emails that will render correctly across multiple devices, eliminating chances for a poor user experience.

To get buy-in, it's necessary to demonstrate the value and ROI of the tool cost you are requesting. Our team reviewed Litmus's capabilities - a built-in HTML editor, real-time rendering screenshots across multiple devices and clients, and behavioral analytics. Our analysis showed such an all-in-one service would greatly improve our team's QA efficiency, with other added benefits (an expert community, analytics, a real-time builder).

Our team demonstrated how such a tool would help our team and guarantee excellent delivery to our clients - making buy-in an easy approval decision.

Twitter: @ladybegu
At my previous company, the budget for database marketing was always tight and never a priority but database sales contribution was supposed to be 80% of total sales so yea I had some serious struggle there. To top this all we did not have a proper email design team so we never got mobile designs along with the desktop designs or for that matter email designs. Pitching to get Litmus as the testing tool was not easy. Questions like - why can't we just setup few test accounts with most popular email clients and test it out ourselves was bothersome! My Litmus business case PPT had 10 slides :) and I am adding each slide as individual para below :) Maybe someone else can use this to build their case tho my PPT was mostly based on Litmus features :) And below is how I managed to get Litmus as a tool to improve the email marketing at my previous job. Thankfully my current company lives and breathes on Litmus!

Slide 1: Why Litmus: Litmus helps to optimize the entire email creation process
Litmus offers preview of emails in 50+ apps & devices
Litmus features that {x-Company} can make use of:
Builder
Checklist
Spam Testing
Page Testing
Email Analytics

Slide 2: Builder
Is a web-based editor that gives instant previews. Design is viewed in both mobile and desktop dimensions, ensuring compatibility across environments.
Every change updates the previews in real time. No more switching between the code editor and ESP—or manually check five separate devices.
Pre-tested and customizable templates that work everywhere is available for use.

Slide 3: Checklist
To verify that the subject line, from name, reply-to address, and preview text are all optimized.
To confirm that the links are working and going to their intended destination. We don’t have to manually check all the links.
To identify images that are broken, taking too long to load, or have excessive file sizes.
To verify that the clickthroughs are being tracked by Litmus, {service_provider:appboy}, and/or Google Analytics.
To preview the email with images off—and get notified about which images are missing ALT text

Slide 5: Spam testing
Litmus tests include spam filters from ISPs and webmail providers.
Litmus not only provides with Spam score but also provides an explanation for the score and advice on how to improve it.
Overall this will help us increase email performance by ensuring more emails are getting through our subscribers.

Slide 6: Page Testing
Page testing feature by Litmus can be used for previewing how campaign landing pages appear in popular web browsers on both desktop and mobile platforms.
This will help us optimize the entire subscriber journey and identify browser rendering issues.

Slide 7: Email Analytics
Shows which devices and apps our subscribers use. Moving forward we can know the device & app used % and customize the email templates accordingly.
Tracks forwards & prints.
Pinpoints subscribers geolocation.
Shows how long our subscribers spend reading the email. We can compare read rate by devices.

Slide 8: Top 10 email clients
The positions of the top 10 email clients have remained relatively unchanged since December 2015
Apple iPhone 32.91%
Gmail 15.64%
Apple iPad 11.58%
Android 9.52%
Apple Mail 7.51%
Outlook 7.3%
Yahoo! Mail 2.87%
Outlook.com 2.57%
Windows Mail 1.41%
Windows Live Mail 1.04%

At {x-company} we have access to Apple iPhone5s, Samsung galaxy, some versions of outlook & Gmail
Litmus offers preview of emails in 50+ apps & devices

Slide 9: Price
I would recommend we go for the Plus account at least to begin with so that we can monitor the spam score.
Later we can downgrade to the Basic account.

Slide 10: Conclusion
{Service_provider} is not a native ESP hence lacks some basic functionality like Email trend reports or email device view reports, Litmus can help us bridge the gap and also help us improve deliverability and quality of the emails.

Twitter: @ableandre

So what's the story?

My story about buy-in is actually about last year's Litmus Live. As you might know, just getting there can be a bit expensive and that's something I couldn't afford on my own. Getting buy-in from my employer was absolutely necessary and this is how I did it.

How I got the a-ok!

I drafted up a proposal for my boss and his boss detailing what I would bring back to the team. These were not general takeaways like, learn more about analytics or network with email community. But rather, create a new template design for our weekly bulletin email based on what I've learned during the conference or give a presentation to the marketing team on how our email communications could be better.

The real takeaway?

Two things actually. To get buy-in for something:

• Make sure to be concise and detailed on what you want/need/are willing to provide.
• Litmus Live is a blast and you can actually learn a great deal while you're there — how about getting one of those Golden Tickets ;)

@aromayne

To get a buy-in to improve a tool or process, I think it's important to show how that change will improve more than just the email marketer's life/job. The best adjustments have bigger impacts, so talking to other departments and roles to strategize can help that request to be better received. It can also more-universally improve your email marketing.

There was life before Litmus and life after. Our email team was wasting a lot of time figuring out hacks to test rendering in multiple clients. Once the decision makers were presented with the time suck and ongoing frustrations without a testing tool like Litmus, they saw the light and pulled the trigger. @SethKong

@authenticcre8
In the past I used to test in various mail clients manually. After our tender to move onto a new email platform, I was given the task of generating a suite of templates and bring in responsive elements. Then I discovered Litmus, it is a really useful tool, from testing to tips and of course checklists, QA procedures and analytics.

Integrating Litmus into my workflow has increased productivity by over 50%, I no longer have to manually test in umpteen clients. Thank you to the Litmus team for creating an incredible tool. I would absolutely love to attend the Litmus Live. Please award me a Golden Ticket?

Twitter: @NMaudlin

I had a client that was using an unsupported font as Live Text surrounded by images in email, and no matter how I reworked the font-family fall backs, there was nearly always rendering breaks in at least one client. It got to the point where I had to decrease font-sizes 5 or 6px just to keep the text from spilling over. Thanks to Litmus, I was able to create a document that extensively outlined the appearance of their email in every client and offer some email-safe alternatives. Now it's all Verdana, and I can sleep at night without worrying what Outlook 2013 is doing!

Twitter: @jcheida

This was one of the easiest pitches I've ever had.

My company is in the Insurance space and as such typically has very informative emails (they have TOO MUCH CONTENT). As click through rates and opens continued to drop, on several campaigns I implemented Litmus Analytics. For months I had been telling the team that was responsible for the content that the audience was becoming overwhelmed and that we needed to find a way to condense the emails.

I used the Litmus Analytics to show that the average read time for these emails was less than 5 seconds. We used that as a baseline to redesign and reformat the messages to be easily skimmed with links to read additional content if they wanted. After a few months of using this "reader friendly" design, we have seen a noticeable uptick in opens/clicks.

It took a while to get the buy-in because the engagement didn't jump overnight. With some patience the Opens/Clicks started to rise and now the team writing for these campaigns has shared it and other teams are now using a similar strategy.

Twitter: @inkceptional

For us, and like so many other #emailgeeks, it is always overcoming client bias toward "everything should be an image", "it should look the same everywhere" and "use my official fonts." The first step in getting buy-in was to use Litmus Analytics to get insight into the engagement and reading behavior of their recipients. That gave us two very important pieces of data: 1) that the vast majority of recipients were using non-Outlook clients and 2) a substantial percentage of their recipients were not loading images. The Outlook piece was important because this particular event was way-way-way back in the days of Outlook 2007 before we all understood how to make background images in Outlook work. It also allowed us to establish that having the email look consistent across email clients wasn't essential. More importantly, it allowed us to showcase the high percentage of recipients that weren't necessarily loading the images - so having an email that degraded gracefully and was extremely readable without images became a major initiative.

Having those baseline analytics was also important for proving their buy-in was the right decision. Months later we were able to look back at the analytics and show the positive gains in engagement and correlate that with their own internal conversion tracking. Years later, as the majority of their readership has shifted to mobile, it was a simple process to get them to embrace the design changes we needed to make to introduce responsiveness to their newsletters.

Cheers!

@leerobertdavies

At my previous job we needed to step up our email game, we were only only doing batch and blast. By luck an ESP called our marketing manager, I showed him how useful and valuable segmentation and automation could be, and after two presentations to the CEO and a lot of convincing that the minimal monthly cost would be recouped multiple times with our new email marketing approach, we had sign off. One year, countless segmented campaigns, seven separate automated campaigns and an additional six figures of turnover later, and the CEO was pretty chuffed. As he should be!

Actually, one cost that we found a need for was Litmus, pre-Litmus days, we were collecting everyone's email addresses to send tests to as we started to introduce responsive design. When we came across Litmus to help us support these efforts and take less time from everyone involved outside of the email department. It has been such a valuable part of our jobs that putting a price tag on it is not enough. Twitter: @mswansonblr

Twitter: @thestefmich

As marketeer I'm not the decision maker within our agency, far from. However I am often asked to review or trial a new package or tool. With Litmus, the biggest leverage given from our team was based on the practical advantage. "No more need to consider buying various phones, tablets and whatever."- in general as agency I feel we focus on cutting costly time. Reaching a buy-in must have the requirement of a low learning curve (unless extremely specialist tool), practical and reliable. if it costs unnecessary time trying to work a tool, it will create time gaps and ultimately cash in.

We have a great team of decision makers that feel if it saves us time and hassle, it's the right tool. Sometimes this means the tool can be simple and maybe not as ultra-featured as long as it is smooth.

I work for a small healthcare marketing company and when I came on board working for the company they really wanted to start working on creating their own email campaigns. So as a designer that had created 1 html email ever, I was suddenly tasked with being the developer and designer for multiple clients at a fast rate. I learned a lot of things really quickly and the biggest was my Gmail and iPhone checking was a bad idea. Originally the company wanted to just use Litmus for a couple months and then end the service. I knew this would be a mistake so I started logging how much time I spent on Litmus. Needless to say, we have been customers for 8 months now and I have learned so much from the service! The next task I am working on is bringing more of our testing and workflow into Litmus. The blog has had a lot of articles about workflow lately and I'm planning on having a meeting soon to show how we could start utilizing Litmus more as a team :)

Twitter handle is @PaigeSiebold

I got myself a lot of extra creative control of email within our organisation.

It is a very traditional non-ecommerce business and email marketing is regarded mainly as sticking a header image over a page of text - we send to over 60% Outlook users so often this is still the safest way!

I had no access to any html editors so most of my learning and development was done in notepad and then viewed in an ie window, you can well imagine this took forever to get anything done.

When I discovered Litmus builder it gave me the space to get more creative and implement techniques and designs that would be much more appealing to the eye, even in outlook! Being able to show these to my senior managers opened a few eyes and demonstrated there were more creative options to building emails than text or sliced up images.

Since having the extra freedom I've been able to develop solid templates for the day to day work allowing extra development time for larger projects seeing a leap in open to click go from 10% to 30%+ in many cases.

Twitter: @kjguthrie

Twitter: @pompeii79

I got my work to start using Litmus analytics so we could tell which email clients were being used to open our emails. That saved production time.

To bring my company's email marketing to the next level I have been using Litmus to show my results for email rendering.
Because my company uses corporate outlook, often when I trigger test email messages to my group, they wanted to correct outlook specific issues. Using analytics tests from Litmus to identify what percentage of users in our list were actually at risk for viewing an email in outlook, and providing best practices for email marketing (not to fix for one platform) I was able to move my company away from getting stuck on the outlook rendering and move our focus towards mobile responsiveness and deliverability, vs. rendering issues in specific platforms.

@seaatsunset

I first came across Litmus at an iModules user conference, we found their tools for reporting and testing inadequate at the time, and a few peer schools kept mentioning Litmus.

The buy-in was simple, you provided the tools to easily increase and leverage our marketing communications to prospective student and alumni audiences. Two years later we are still using and loving your services, they continue to help us focus on a balance of design and functionality, and increase our opens, clicks, and provide more granular analytics.

Dave Herringshaw aka @RedHerringshaw

The last buy-in we got was actually for Litmus. The free trial and screenshots were enough to get the go-ahead on buying in. Our previous method involved opening emails in as many email clients/browsers as we could possibly find (primitive, I know). The business benefit of using a tool like Litmus was obvious, and our development time was drastically reduced (as were our headaches). Twitter: @amy_millikan

Twitter: @hillaryhamman

My email marketing team is fairly fresh, in the sense that many of us are just learning about email in the last 2 years. I come from a UI/UX background so I'm always curious about how users are interacting with email. We have been struggling with designers on our team who don't understand the concept of true Email Design, and often times design something that while it looks beautiful its not practical for an email send.

One of those times was over the holidays, we were sending out a holiday email card, and the designer wanted to use animation. Now I'm all for animation but I suspected that since we were just sending this email out to our staff and clients, that most of them would be in outlook and therefore miss the entire concept of the design. I suggested an alternative but was initially voted out and we proceeded with the animated version.

After the craziness of year end (our clients are NPOs) I approached my supervisor and ask if we could invest in using the litmus analytics. I felt strongly that if you knew how your email list was interacting with their emails we could design a better experience. We could then have cold hard facts to back up any suspicions. She agreed to do a test run, as we were sending out another email to the same office list as the holiday party. We attached the code and bam! instant report. We were able to see that in deed at least 52% of our list were on outlook, and that our holiday message probably didn't come across as well as we'd hoped.

The entire team was so impressed with the results that we are using the litmus analytic code going forward to better understand the users, and then be able to provide a better email experience to them.

Twitter: EEEEVAN

I've learned that proof, usually data and numbers, have always helped me get buy in for anything I needed that would help improve our email marketing. Before we were Litmus users, signing up for the newsletters and downloading the years in review provided that proof that Litmus would help us be more informed about email design and marketing. After becoming Litmus users, using the data from the tools used in analytics and QA helped us go from focusing on desktop based users in the beginning, to focusing on responsive design, targeting our audience and improving deliverability and response.

Hi email marketers!

What I’ve found to be the most effective way to get “buy-in” is to DO YOUR RESEARCH and really dive deep into understanding what you are trying to accomplish. If you are clearly knowledgeable and passionate about bringing your email marketing to the next level, people will listen.

I just recently lead a project for my team to find and use a new email service provider. It all started when we started having issues with our current systems, and we were looking for a way to consolidate all properties into one system (YES! Each one of our properties uses a different ESP). Since I used to work for an ESP/Marketing Automation company, I know a lot of different capabilities out there and which ones are the best – so it was a great project management opportunity.

I researched the top enterprise level ESPs to understand what was offered and sifted through a few case studies from their most successful clients. I filled out contact forms on each ESP’s website to learn more, and was contacted by different sales representatives. I gave each sales representative a one-sheet of use cases we wanted to discuss and learn about (mostly pain points we were experiencing with our current systems). I set up demos with each ESP, and they presented their system and our examples to my full marketing operations team and our data-side of the business. I wanted as many need-to-know people to see these presentations as possible to fully sell this idea.

After the demos, I broke down the pros and cons of each system into an easily digestible spreadsheet with pros and cons for each system. I walked through this document with my Sr. Director so that he could fully understand which aspects were most important to us and which systems I was leaning toward. After a few more discussions, we narrowed down the search to the top two systems, and I worked with my Sr. Director and VP of Data to decide on system and work out a deal.

Twitter: @elizabethbaker3

Twitter handle: @leinahtandlareg

I am a developer that started off being in an advertising agency, campaigns are usually packed with websites and also EDMs. However, coming to terms with a decent email design was never that easy. Countless hours were put into fixing cross-client problems, haunted by a gruesome process that involves sending emails to multiple clients. I've developed over hundreds of emailers and I kid not, it was a pain to test the emails. Not forgetting that we have to send these test mails through different channels, it was then MailChimp came along and it solved the problem of sending test emails.

Unfortunately it isn't anywhere close to real solution to our gruesome process, that's when we've all discovered Litmus. Usually we would spend half a day to a full day in testing and developing an email, but with Litmus we would finish it in an hour max. The introduction of Litmus was more than just a convenient tool, it became an essential tool for our kind of work. It was email testing and quality assurance on steroids, we couldn't wait any longer and it became our team's essential tool in email development.

As we progressed with Litmus, we were welcomed with even more great features that improved our strategy in email marketing. We were glad that Litmus introduced the analytics feature, it gave our email development even more meaning. It provided us more data on how our emails were being read, how many were opened etc.. and from all these data, it taught us how to improve our design and development better.

Lastly being in such a big agency, multiple roles(Project managers, Creative Designers, Project leads) were involved in overseeing the development of our emails. We are very grateful that we are able to share our reports, our test screens with the team without any hassle.

In conclusion, we were drowning in a pool of pain developing and testing emails. Our team sees it as a hassle to be investing into email marketing because of our inefficient it is. However by using Litmus, it solved all our problems and also allowed us to invest more into email marketing for ourselves and also for our clients.

Twitter: @AimeOkeefe

As a two-person team, our email marketing program was in the dark ages until very recently. As we tried to renovate our systems, we reviewed a variety of services that would bolster our deliverability rates and give us advanced development and reporting tools --which generally meant more money from the purse strings.

To illustrate the long-term benefit of the extra cost up front, I built a Time-to-ROI comparison projection based on initial start-up costs versus benefits of the ESP. Illustrating the difference these advanced services like Litmus and our current ESP would serve in the long-run to increase email engagement made all the difference in getting buy-in from executives on more expensive services.

Twitter: @suecho

At Dollar Shave Club, we had a new TV campaign called #razorburn. It was created for TV commercial purposes, but I proposed extending that campaign into email with a new referral email campaign. I pitched the idea of using the theme "friends don't let friends get #razorburned" and incorporate a gif made from a part of the TV commercial into the email. Because this required a lot of resources, I of course used data to back up my project. I compared the CPA of the Acquisition Team vs the CPA via email (using our current metrics for referral signups and email cost). I showed a graph that depicted how email was 300% more cost efficient at acquiring a new user vs a display buy CPA, and I immediately got full support from the creative and marketing teams. Power of email success!

Twitter: @beckymwood

Hi email marketers!

At my last company, I prepared a short cost/benefit analysis of Litmus for email testing. Before Litmus, we were testing across our own personal devices —a huge pain! All it took to convince the C-suite was seeing how many hours of our developers' time were wasted doing that kind of testing. Technical talent is precious (and expensive), so getting Litmus freed up our developers for other projects. Best decision ever!

At Litmus we were inspired by the entire Litmus Community's answers to this contest for how they got buy-in for tools, projects, or experiments, we put together a short guide for anyone out there struggling to get buy-in for Litmus—download it here.

We hope this helps you inch closer to getting that all important buy-in you might need.

Twitter: @MarioAC3

I'm a email newbie, to be honest. The only reason why I got hired was because I had a UX, HTML, CSS and Graphic Design background. Prior to my job, I had heard that coding emails was hard, but to be honest I never imagine it was going to be that hard!
I remember that they brought me in, and the expectations were really high! They were averaging an open rate of 2.2% and my manager understood that email was the Marketing Channel with more ROI in the company. So started to dip myself in the amazing #emailgeek world. I learned that email marketing is extremely complex, and we needed tools.
I found out that they were designing emails, exporting them as pngs and sending them as just one image. I also found out that the ESP we were using, wasn't just giving us the capabilities we needed (and it was charging us a ton). So, my first move as a shiny new Email Marketing Specialist was to change ESPs. Mind you, this was my second day in the job, so my manager wonder if it was the correct move. I gather tons of data of the ESP that I wanted to use, I showed him the support for responsive email templates, and did some graphs on how changing to an ESP was going to better out open rates and at the end our conversions. My manager, reluctantly, accepted, and we made the change. I remember that our first campaign we sent with the new ESP, we used a responsive template, that alone, return an incredible 12% open rate. I remember my manager smiling when I told him the open rate of that email.
After that, my manager wasn't as reluctant with other tools. I decided that it was time to code emails and make them look better than the blocky templates that we were using, and thats how we discovered Litmus, when I showed him the tool, and how we could see the emails across different email clients, he was delighted. Our emails are now mobile friendly and they look good. After all this changes we have been averaging a 34% open rate, we have discovered best practices on how to track the conversions of those emails and emails alone have brought more than $300,000 in direct conversions.
Now, I need them to buy me a good computer, since I'm using my own persona MacBook pro.... oh, and a raise would be nice too! :)

Twitter: @wensleydale_

I've always struggled to get buy-in on specific tools but my first success was getting my last company onto a litmus subscription. The importance of testing in different clients was a hard sell but the aspect that sealed the deal was litmus builder. We were already paying for a dreamweaver cc license so being able to go in and explain how litmus could replace an existing piece of software that the team already understood as an important part of email development was easier than trying to explain the need for a completely new piece of software.

When we moved from static to responsive templates, there was some push back as there folks were used to their old ways and I was honest about the development work that would be needed.

I was able to get buy in by using the litmus previews to show how much better the emails looked along with some statics stating that (at the time) ~80% of email opens were on mobile.

Needless to say, we have been using responsive templates ever since @williamafinn

@jonathanpay

I'm lucky enough to work as an email marketing consultant, so I get brought in to help others get buy-in for what they want to do with email.

Recently had a client who approached us to help them on several fronts in their email marketing as it was being restricted in favour of another team. Our first step was to produce a review for them as an outside authority.

Getting buy-in is often achieved by addressing the stakeholder's pain-points. They're thinking "what's in it for me?" or "so what?" - Use that to your advantage and support it where you can with numbers, because stakeholders love numbers.

I made a pitch for us to include a full time QA person and to incorporate a detailed process flow for email creation. The value of this was demonstrated by showing how we could improve the quality of our digital communications experience and eliminate errors that damaged our brand. The time spent to create and delivery emails is increased by such a process, but the value on the backend can be priceless. Or actually it can be worth lots of dollars. :-) I have also submitted a request to come to Litmus and share this knowledge and talk about how I implemented it. Hoping there is still a chance that can happen, so Justine if you're reading this, I'm still looking for that rose! https://youtu.be/aRx3GcQ_WVA
Sincerely yours,
@DawgsFan_19

We always welcome alternatives to existing software solutions with open arms. Our team is always seeking better ways to do things, so whenever someone finds a software solution that is better than anything we're currently using, we get a few members of the team to trial it out for a month. If it fits in our workflow a lot better than previous solutions, then we go with it. Key things we look for are:

1) Ease of use -> Is it easier to use than the existing solution?
2) Ease of adoption -> Is there a steep learning curve associated with a new solution?
3) Efficiencies gained -> With the improved performance and reduced time, what other items can we focus on?
4) Cost-savings -> Of course, cost-savings are always nice - so does it save us $$

Twitter: @VNSNK

At my company, we tend to test a lot of creative and approaches. If I feel strongly about an idea, I like to mock it up and show the marketing team. Getting buy-in is much easier when they can see a visual to represent the idea. We're always willing to test against the control.

Twitter: @stephbrauer

Our biggest challenge (a few years ago now) was getting buy in to develop fully responsive emails, or at the very least developing a mobile view of our emails.

Whilst we knew this was the right thing to do, commercially it didn't make sense to spend more time developing these features if the clients weren't going to pay for it, so we needed to convince them it was a worthwhile investment.

To do this we used a combination of email stats (including those offered by Litmus) to show the trend in people opening emails on mobile devices, along with whatever stats we could get from our biggest clients email dispatch system (responsys, urgh).

These stats clearly showed an upward trend, and when we presented the Litmus screenshots of current emails and how they appeared in mobile clients, it proved enough to get most clients to buy in to the extra development time.

The other business advantage was getting this buy in, getting the extra cash from the clients to develop these emails, and then improving/automating our processes to produce these emails even quicker. £££ :-D

@chapmanio

Twitter: @markwhyy

Before I started at my current company, emails had always been done the same way. Lots images created with lots of slices in Photoshop. I knew that we needed to go responsive with our emails due to how many we send and because of our clients' various target markets. For some of them, the end-user's only access to the internet is through a smartphone and having emails for job alerts, company news, and more that looked good on small screens was very important. It was a matter of looking at the data, seeing the huge percentage of readers that view emails on mobile devices, and making the changes to the infrastructure from there. Because of everything new that we were doing, we then went to Litmus for testing to make sure that everything looked good,

We used to juggle a bunch of personal email accounts and send tons of test emails to all of them, worked but was time consuming (and we didn't have access to all the email clients any way), seeing the time savings and features of an app like Litmus, it really sold itself. Getting buy-in wasn't hard.

Twitter: @evandiaz

It was very simple really - just showing the rendering pages in Litmus and showing how previous campaigns had failed on so many email clients.

Twitter username: @OffrediBrittany

My manager has been in the email marketing industry for over 20 years, and his go-to for everything is Litmus. The only service we've found to be easy, user-friendly and straightforward for spam testing is Litmus - my manager swears by it. In past roles (and now in my current role!) I have made so much use of the client/browser Design Builder for code rendering, and it has saved my hide on multiple occasions. Litmus is a must-have for any and every professional email marketer!

Twitter: @ItsmeJade
Our customer emails was broken in a number of email clients and management kept asking me 'how, why & what'.
I explained that we had no software to test the code & how the emails would appear. I explained we could try and do it manually, which would take hours of my time, hire another developer to redo or, throw a little budget at the problem and get a Litmus account.
I showed management the angry customer complaints & broken emails, vs emails that displayed correctly (after some minor tweaks) in all clients almost instantly with Litmus! Simply amazing!

My company already had a subscription to Litmus when I joined, and it was a lifesaver. TIMESAVER! I loved the free online sessions from last year's conference. Love the litmus podcasts. Use the builder all the time. I've been a sponge because email marking is a new world for me and I really like it. I plead my case down to all the expenses, in hopes that my company would have it in their budget to send me to Litmus Live. However, my company is in the middle of a lot of restructuring. So, I am trying my luck at winning a ticket. @langdesignshop

Twitter @thesenewknights

Education and collaboration with other teams who see the immediate benefits of improved email rendering using litmus. I'm handling over 40 brands and clearly demonstrating how tools like Litmus streamline my work progress and allow me to focus on our customer journey is a big bonus to my company.

I've found the best way to get a buy-in from others is to show them how it best impacts what they care about--usually involving an aspect of time, cash, and/or quality. Like many others who have commented today using tools such as Litmus or Email on Acid is just one aspect of this. I've used these tools to show my clients and my co-workers why the quality is impacted by time and why it may cost more for a specific feature. I've also used this concept to improve workflows, increase productivity, and open up better communication between co-workers and clients.

Showing others the why and how it affects what matters to them is inherent to my success as an email marketer because it allows me to align my audience's priorities with those who are already invested in seeing the success of a campaign.

Twitter: @issamccollum

Prove the value ahead of the ask. We have a little bit of freedom here in the office to experiment with new things so sometimes it is better to ask forgiveness rather than permission in a lot of cases when we are talking about low risk initiatives. We currently in the process of transitioning our email to responsive design templates on a global scale. At first we actually had a lot of resistance as we have a lot of local and regional users of our ESP who are not skilled at HTML and CSS. We use Adobe Campaign with hard coded WYSIWYG email delivery templates for these users, while our global level users are able to use HTML. I went ahead and used Litmus analytics to look at our recipients to see what email clients they were using. It turns out that 1/3 of our recipients were using mobile devices. With this new information I worked with our Manager of Digital Design who created a new responsive HTML template. Taking this new template I did some limited testing, showing some great results in favor of responsive. I took this data and to our web team and got the go ahead to do more higher level testing and eventually was able to roll out responsive templates to our global partners. Once we had the buy in at the global level our region and local partners started asking for these new templates. We are now in the process of developing new delivery templates that support responsive design with expected rollout sometime in the next month.

Twitter: @cryptognomicon

When I took my first email-specific gig, the organization was still slicing full image-based emails and really had no sense of their subscribers' client market share or how/why to really move into responsive email templates and live-text, etc. Having used Litmus at an agency in the past, I knew there was a lot of data to gain on subscribers. We also had Google Analytics data that indicated a strong uptick in mobile traffic to our site, confirming that a responsive approach to email was critical.

This data (and the promise of more) was the key to getting buy-in to increase our use of Litmus and other tools that improve (and speed up) our email development and allow for an approach more in sync with our subscriber base client usage.

Twitter: @pbiolsi

Litmus previews and builder will help massively and is a must for any email marketer equally as impressive as the UI is the level of analytic data also available. I was able to get approval quite easily however if there is a struggle, opt in for a free account, take some of the previous email issues and "fix" them using the litmus tool and share the information with management. Total cost of the tool vs time spent searching for a fix, testing also even sometimes waiting for results is a lot higher than what's on offer. @sheldonandrew

Twitter: @chim77richalds

We recently updated our weekly newsletter template to a two-column email using one of Litmus' tested templates. Because we have a wide variety of mobile users with different clients and browsers, it was very important that our two-column layout look right across all of them, so we spent hours testing in Litmus to make sure the modifications we'd made to the template weren't going to break things in any clients/browsers. The end result is a fresh, new email template that allows us to feature more content above the fold and increase our chances of catching the readers attention with more headlines visible, while still providing an excellent mobile experience.

As a Design Team within an actual ESP, we have worked on email design for the past 15 years and hence seen a LOT of changes. Like others have commented you always want to make every email look perfect in every situation. For us this comes with the added ... tries to think of appropriate word... pleasure.... (yeah ok, you know i mean pressure really!)... of designing not just one-off HTML campaigns, only touched by our own fair hands, but re-usable templates for our customers to use in our UI.

We've always needed to bear in mind not just what Gmail is going to "bring" to a layout but the code that the user is going to bring to the party once they add content - and for people who like to be in control, believe me, this can be tough! This does though bring the very positive benefit of being actively involved with the development of our system, feeding back to other teams in-house with news of advancements, and the odd backward step (no names but you know who they are!) which we need to account for with our campaign creation tools.

In the midst of all this progression was the mantra of Test, Test and then Test again. For years our designers diligently sent to, and logged into, all the readers and devices that we needed to cover (including a copy of good ol' Lotus Notes) to get the best possible results. Yes it was very thorough, yes it was very first hand, but man was it time consuming. So when they showed me just what Litmus does it was one of those clouds parting, beam of light shining, angels singing, moments. From a tentative trial, it was very quickly demonstrated to management what a fantastic time saving opportunity it was.

Don't get me wrong it took a while to prize everyone's fingers completely off the range of in-house mobiles lying on the "testing desk" (we always aspired to having a desk like Anna Yeaman's!) and we'd been so fiercely proud of every aspect of our company being in-house, never relying on anyone esle - but we did it, and ever since we've been feeling quite giddy with the time that we've freed up and putting it to good use by continually pushing the boundaries of our designs and trying new ideas. Being able to share Litmus Check List results with a customer by means of a url has also been a big hit for me as the customer facing side of the company! So glad we made the leap and joined the community :)

@nettywest

Twitter: @Dipper2009

Litmus has helped shape our emails and improve build time, efficiency and productivity. Gone is the day of spacer gif issues in Lotus Notes or which version of Outlook excepts fonts. With so many new email clients or versioning Litmus is the best way to keep track off them all with a very helpful community to boot.

A couple of years ago, I learned about Litmus from colleagues using the same third-party vendor broadcast email system we are using. Up to that point, I tested new email templates or complex email designs by sending previews to a number of dummy accounts I had set up at various email providers, while also checking via web browsers, downloaded client software on a Mac and using virtual software for PC emulation. It took a lot of time, and wasn't even a complete testing solution (I also sent emails to my personal iOS device to test mobile, but didn't have access to an Android device).

Once I found out about Litmus, I brought it to my bosses, explaining how it would save time in building new email templates as well as allowing me and another colleague on-demand testing of emails in progress, to double-check any complex formatting or design issues. We periodically got emails from disgruntled constituents (alumnae/i of our school) wondering why they couldn't read our emails or why they looked terrible in their email programs -- they held us to a high standard and weren't shy about complaining when we fell short.

As a result, it wasn't too difficult to get buy-in for subscribing to Litmus, and it's been an invaluable tool, especially in demonstrating to internal, non-technical colleagues that their messaging remains intact and well-designed across all the major email clients and devices.

PS: I'm not an email marketer per se, I'm part of the technical information services team responsible for designing/developing email templates, using our vendor's software to build the emails, and troubleshooting any technical issues that arise relating to broadcast emails. However, what we do is critical to improving our school's email marketing, and we also keep on top of trends, techniques, best practices related to email marketing.

Twitter: @susanthology

Our current email marketing solution contract was up and I conducted 6 month long research to see what new tool would work best for our business. I narrowed the search down to the top 5 choices and did demos with team members. As a marketing communications team we decided to go with one and went to senior management and explained how that tool would improve our email marketing, produce better analytics, and allow us to track all aspects of a marketing campaign cutting down on other systems we used (cutting those costs).

Twitter: @jacbergey

Because of the nature of our business, I cannot simply rely on one or a few templates and trust that it's going to work. I'm creating emails from scratch every day, and it's important that those emails display correctly in each browser. That's why I've done my best to make sure every email that goes out is tested using Litmus. Can't just trust that everyone is using Apple Mail or an iDevice. There are still pain points like Notes and Gmail that can make my emails look like Frankenstein!

@michaelburl
When I started working for my current company we primarily used Email on Acid for our testing. Then when I learned of Litmus, I started using it for its Builder feature. Soon it became clear that it would be most beneficial to move entirely to Litmus to gain all the benefits it has to offer.

Getting buy-in can always be tricky, but the best ways are to research thoroughly your reasons as to why you want it.

In the past, I've had to show proof of how we can improve our ways of working, and maximise potential.

If we are buying a tool, we have to show it will improve our way of working, our way of thinking and ultimately increase profits.

twitter: @davethegeek

All we had to do to get Litmus was show management what the emails looked like on our phones. Things were mangled and it was clear we needed to put more effort and TLC into other email clients to meet all of our users' needs! Now we are able to test our daily newsletters and marketing campaigns that go out regularly.

from: @jpetkfull on twitter

We started using Litmus at my old job because Email on Acid just wasn't cutting it. We jumped on board for email rendering testing, and never looked back.

Twitter: @cjsauer

Twitter: @kmoy

I always try to scope out the current situation we're dealing with, whether it comes to strategy, analytics and reporting, historical results, etc. If i can break out what the pain points are, it makes the mission easier to figure out what the best solution would be to address it. With our email marketing, my company also also uses paid advertising to support these campaigns. Being able to vet out partnerships and channels we use requires trial and error as well as research.

Having had a key part in developing strategy, I ask questions and make sure I have as much research and metrics as I need so I can provide buy-in to either continue working with certain partners, or if we need to reconsider. Being able to provide info on how objectives and ROI can be met is so important, because that's why money is being spent in the first place!

Twitter Handle: @mandomandoman

Jaina hit it home, getting buy-in is, in my opinion, the most important part of an email marketers job and the hardest; especially when people have negative opinions on email. Essentially, I present each request or approval as integral to the success of my area of oversight (email marketing) and how that contributes to the success of the over all vision and mission of our organization.

Case in point, I needed additional tools for email testing. As a non-profit organization, we contemplate every cent we spend in an effort to be good stewards of our donor's money. However, my request to my boss started way before I ever needed the additional tools. The set up is that I've created an understanding with my direct supervisor, who oversees all fundraising efforts for our organization, about the importance of email marketing as it is still a new fundraising tool for us. This is a gradual and reoccurring conversation where everyone in upper level management understands how the success of email marketing is directly tied to the success of the organization and that the opposite is true as well. I work hard and intentionally to incorporate email marketing into our fundraising culture. This is done by taking every appropriate opportunity to present the additional income the email program has provided or how email marketing has contributed to the growth of our other marketing channels through multi-channel marketing or the response of our donors to receiving our emails.

When I consider a need I have, the ground work is already laid as they see the importance of my program. My request does bring a cost to it. Now comes in understanding how management thinks. I need to help them see how this additional expenditure brings in more income for us. So when I sit down with my boss, I want to do my best to have them come to that conclusion themselves. That is where their buy-in is the strongest. Again, that starts with their foundational understanding of the program. And as I present the current challenges that this tool solves, she clearly sees the value and potential for the further success of the email marketing program.

Getting buy-in for using Litmus was easy because of the time it saves in creating and testing email and because of the detailed analytics that we don't get from our mailing platforms. I think the most important thing for getting buy-in is to be able to show the ROI, whether that is a result of direct cost savings, time savings, or increased revenue from better emails. Twitter: @JanelClement

Pitched using Litmus more frequently to streamline our process after we've hit a few hurdles (searching for android users in the office just to see email previews on their devices due to a display issue ON Cyber Monday, being one of them) and we're finally going to work Litmus testing into our weekly routine as we begin to do more custom content. Also working on deciding whether or not we should make the move to Sketch... But that's a future buy-in :-) Twitter: @maevamaeve

Twitter: @sweetlilolive

Fortunately buy-in for tools is a top priority in my company if we need them. However getting buy-in for the minutia is usually where we struggle. Spending thousands of dollars on a tool is far easier than getting everyone to agree whether we should be using capital letters in all the words in a headline or just the first word. While it seems petty to argue over these trivial things, they are important to the decision makers in my company so I find the best way to get through these discussions is to show supporting evidence. What is the best practice? What does it say in our style-guide? What are we doing on our website that would justify the decision?

Showing as much evidence as possible and taking care to consider everyone's feelings on the matter is usually the best approach.

I'm currently working on a new dashboard that gathers data from different sources in order to improve my email program. @azevedot

Years ago when I first started developing emails I had the pleasure of logging into different browsers, email applications and devices to manually test my emails. A not so simple spreadsheet of time needed to do this per email was all the leverage that I needed to convince my boss to get me a Litmus account. After that, my time and sanity was dedicated to improving my development skills!

Twitter: @chrismith77

Twitter: @thegremliin

My company was trying to optimize our email marketing approach to increase our deliverability results, and when I mentioned I had used Litmus in a previous role and showed its benefits, it was a no brainer for my team to begin using. The spam filters check and subject line/preview text optimizers are essential to all of our marketing campaigns, and the ability to view email design across devices is invaluable as over half of our market view emails on mobile devices.

Twitter: @kaitcreamer

I'm fortunate to work for a company that believes in the power of a good email marketing strategy, so I didn't have the uphill battle that a lot of other email marketers do.

When I started, we were sending a lot archaic, one image at the top, five paragraphs of copy at the bottom, batch and blast messages. Our messaging was stale and I'm convinced nobody ever actually read our emails. Fortunately, everyone knew something had to change, so off we went. Our design team created a few basic layouts for responsive emails. From there, I created custom templates that would work on all clients. Slowly, our copy became shorter, friendlier, and more transparent. Things were changing! Meanwhile, our content strategy was changing and people were subscribing to our blog more and more. They wanted to hear what we were saying!

The biggest challenge I've had so far is convincing my team of the value of the scroll and using email as a landing page (Thanks, Alex Williams!) simply because it takes longer to build a single email. As a one-woman email marketing team, it can be tough to convince my superiors and colleagues to let me spend a lot of time on any one project. A few weeks ago, I pitched an idea for an email to get more folks signed up for a free version of a new product we're really excited about (that hasn't taken off like we'd planned). They humored me, and the creation process was a little messy. There were some concerns along the way, but I'm so glad my team trusted me.

In the two days following the launch of my big super-awesome mega email, we got 4x our normal amount of free trial signups. Our sales team is totally swamped and totally thrilled. They've told me that people finally understand the new product and what it does. Now my team is looking for other ways to leverage the same content because it did so well and I have a little more freedom to spend more time on making emails that people really get excited about. I can't wait to build more!

Twitter: Otherside_uk

I head up a small team of email developers who have to handle quite large volumes of email builds. We were finding that on occasions, due to the sheer volume of work, small mistakes kept slipping through. In addition we always felt the pressure when we were down a member due to holidays or sickness. So we collaborated as a group to see what we could do to fix this then took our proposal to our digital manager, who agreed we could give it a go when we had some down time.

One of the ways we felt this could be improved was to think of a way to reduce testing times so we collaborated with our front end dev's to develop an in-house testing tool. We upload our emails to a server where we can then share hosting links for clients, but there is also a development section that allows us to check things like alt tags, title tags, display block on images , missing links etc. (can't give it all away) all at the simple click of a button. The effect it had was massive! it pretty much cut our testing times in half and all those minor mistakes now get picked up. It was such a success that we still try and add new features to it when time permits.

For us, we've found that we need hard numbers to get buy in on almost anything. We get a lot further if we can dig in and present some relevant data (even if it's just a good estimation), rather than just having someone further up take us on our word. For example, when we wanted to add preview text to our email templates, we were getting pushback because it was just one more thing for the copywriters to come up with and one more thing for legal to approve. When we were able to come back with some data from reliable sources that showed increased open rates with preview text, we got the go ahead.

@kathryngrayson

My experience is quite fortunate. As a Marketing Automation Consultant I have typically received the necessary 'buy-in' at the proposal stage and been provided the luxury of implementing the services and systems I deemed necessary to meet the clients Marketing targets.

@misfitpsycles

I work at a higher education institution, and getting buy-in for a new software can be difficult. A few steps I take:

-Compare all options. Show why the software I've chosen is best -- the pros, cons, and why its a better choice than its competitors (whether is price of benefits offered)

-Provide a timeline of implementation and support. A big problem in higher ed is "keeping the process moving". Between regulations and low-budgets, it can be difficult for departments to give software the full support needed for proper implementation and support. If I'm suggesting a software, I'll outline what it will take to start using it and to keep it going - including budget and staff resources.

-Pilot test. If I want to roll-out a software campus-wide, starting with a department or college as a pilot test to prove results is best. It's the most effective way to get buy in across campus.

My twitter handle is @KatieMaeColombo

We couldn't justify using a lot of virtual machines with windows licenses to check the emails in every outlook client.
After we found Litmus it was a very easy choice to make. Our clients are also happy to see that their email designs come to life on even the older email clients.

Ever since, we've been using Litmus to test and develop the email campaigns. Our clients have gotten used to the previews and have started to use Litmus as well.

Twitter: @YoungDudeSays

My company needed analytics data which our former vendor didn't offer. Once we found Litmus our open rate started climbing.
Twitter handle: @maddox_grayson

If you're trying to get a company to buy-in to a new tool/project/approach then they will need to be compared among a couple of competitors against how they will best fit the companies' requirements. Positives and negatives, projected scalability and financial ROI.

These stats should be presented to key decision makers within the company, with demonstrations and visuals of the shortlisted suggestions, potentially including free trials or demo's for software, or conversations, projection figures and strategic plans for projects or approaches.

It's important to stay true to the companies' requirements and not be mislead by 'freebies' or popularity of tools/approaches to make sure that you agree to the best outcome for the company.

Twitter: @molkit

I work with B2B clients and getting buy-in for more exciting, forward-thinking emails can be tough at times! I find that showing two proof of concepts helps; one that is more traditional, and one that is more modern.

Anytime we can back up our suggestions with data, that's a huge plus! As you can imagine, clients are more willing to push the envelope if there's data to support it's success.

If we're lucky, clients are interested in A/B testing different designs and we're able to learn more about the audience! That's really best case scenario for us and them, in my opinion.

Twitter: @melaniebeth_

One of my previous teams had limited data on their emails and when we were kicking off a template redesign project, we were printing out the emails to build a physical catalogue. We were also using a template that was built a long time ago and no one knew how it performed in different browsers.

So by showing the organization or templates, data of analytics, and the visual testing of all the different email clients, it became really easy to get the team to buy in. We needed a process for our emails and Litmus gave us that.

Twitter: @sean_kennedy

Before I started, we were simply sending test emails to our Yahoo/Hotmail/Gmail accounts and testing in whatever version of Outlook we all had. It was inefficient to say the least, and I began looking for a solution. After finding Litmus, it was only a matter of time - and convincing Management of the cost, since we aren't an email marketing crew, but simply building emails for clients to use in our system. After showing the time saving efforts, alongside the simplicity and boosted productivity of Litmus - we were in!

@golfermarsh

I received permission to use Litmus by "testing" it. That's the magical phrase. Once I showed the team everything it could do, we couldn't go back.

@AggieSlom

Since I'm the main email marketing designerI have had complete creative freedom over the emails that we send out. Since I have started we have switched providers and incorporated Litmus into our testing process. This allows us to forsee any kinks/problems that may show up in different email clients! The company I work for is very open to trying anything new and interesting in order to make our email groundbreaking while still adhering to Brand standards and pleasing our current customer while reaching out to a new demographic!

Slicing images for email was boring, old, and it really did not provide a lot of creative control. Litmus made it easier for my teams to create and test multiple versions of our email content. It has cut down time and costs when it comes to being able to manipulate our content and it cleared new avenues for us to quickly build and test unique content. Major win for us. Definitely a must have in your email toolkit.

@AndrewOfforjebe

@ShaylaSenn

The biggest thing that I helped take our email marketing to the next level was making our out of date templates responsive. Also making our emails work properly in Gmail.

To get buy-in, we run A/B tests so we an quantify the impact of our email marketing campaigns. We sometimes even test 10/10/80, with the 10/10 as the actual A/B and the other 80 to ensure that 90% of our customers see the default version.

Twitter: emilyqueue

Twitter: @d_anniemator

Something that has really changed the way my company does email marketing is animated headers for emails. With an animation background, making gifs is an easy task and it really adds another dimension to an email campaign. But Litmus has given some great advice on how to make gifs be effective in every email client. My company has seen some great results!

Twitter: @j_justice

My team codes a lot of emails, like 20+ per week. After attending TEDC 2016, I got buy off on creating a workflow tool similar to what other teams are doing using preprocessors and task runners in order to speed up SLAs. Project EVE is currently in development and uses gulp, panini, and custom code. We're hoping to use it in production by the end of the month!

Almost all cases must be presented in terms of fiscal improvement. I recently worked on some internal automation tools, which are easy to present a case for value compared with manual labor.

@dyspop on twitter

In our case it depends a great deal on our clients. In the end it comes down to timing, maturity, openness, and ultimately trust. If you're starting with a blank slate it can be easier to innovate, but it takes some time to explain your reasoning for doing so, starting from the basics. Some clients are stuck in a rut in "we've always done it this way" mode. There usually you have to be persuasive in the benefits of changing things up, and usually even if you convince a client to change they aren't always gung ho about things. I've experienced other clients that didn't understand a word that we said (responsive emails, even when demonstrated on litmus for email client and renderings, were too advanced a concept) and only adopted changes in-house after we'd ended our project.

Twitter: @christinacraver

@shaunlichti

Convincing folks that preview lines were a huge (and missed) opportunity was as simple as running some A/B tests to demonstrate their efficacy. Once people saw the difference that having a compelling preview line could make, it wasn't hard to get comprehensive process change implemented.

Take away? Be sure to always evaluate if there is a way to demonstrate the value of your suggestion or approach through quantitative testing. Though it might not always be enough on its own, the road to implementation will almost always be smoother if you have some data backing your argument.

@ttermine

Improved email development workflow on our team by establishing tried and tested re-usable base code and snippets. The results, improved testing, and time saved convinced team buy-in.

My buy-in strategy (as an email developer):

Keep the back-burner burning: Make a list of what you want to improve / get buy-in for. Put any spare moment towards innovation — that way new solutions are already prepared for use when opportunity presents itself.

Show and tell: Explain why improvements are important using hard numbers like market share and analytics. Show before and after Litmus tests, live pages, or send test emails that show measurable and/or tangible improvement. Share links to informative posts from industry leaders that lend authority to your position.

Seize opportunity: When a new email design needs programming or a client wants to "start over" with a redesign or code refresh, then it's time to put the back-burner innovation to work. Present solutions that are a demonstrable improvement. A solid path to buy-in is if you can present evidence that it will not only improve the end result, but will save yourself, someone else, or the team as a whole time and/or money.

I've been able to get approval from my boss(es) to program large, reusable email templates that saved myself time and saved money on projects in the long run by starting small on the back-burner, trying it out with a small client, and then presenting the success stories and results from that client to get approval to go bigger and better using the same concept for larger clients. This strategy snowballs really well!
Happy email marketing!

Twitter: @rebeccastagebrg

Twitter: creativechinch

The key is how can what you want to do or build bring value. How will it impact your overall workflow. And how will it put your brand or service at the forefront.

In our team, these are the things we measure. We don't work on things because they look cool or simply because they are cutting-edge. We do it because its going to push our brand forward. You also have to learn talk to those you are trying to get buy-in from. What is on their agenda and can the project or tool you want to work on incorporate some of what the stakeholder wants.

If you understand the vision and mission of your organization, you'll know whether or not what you want to do will compliment it or be a waste of time.

Twitter: @mr_stephenhill

How did you get buy-in to improve a specific tool, project, approach, or anything else to bring your email marketing to the next level?

Firstly, I'm going to look at this from a Product Marketing perspective. Since I first started designing emails 11 years ago (ouch!), my job role in my company has changed considerably. From Junior to Senior Designer designing emails for small startups to huge automated email campaigns, and now to UX / UI Designer for our overall product that our clients use.

Because I've been there on the sharp side of things e.g. conference calls in our clients timezone, being shouted at on a conference call loud enough for our whole office to hear because an email doesn't look right on Lotus Notes 7 etc... My knowledge and experiences are often enough to get buy-in by itself. This might come across as big headed - but please it's not meant to be!

My point is - that only when you've experienced what your customers pain points are - can you truly speak with the authority to help improve something, which in my case is our actual product.

Twitter: @jaymielkohl

I happen to be a very fortunate soul who works for a medium-sized company with small-company culture. Trust is high, and bureaucracy is low. I was hired to rebuild our in-house marketing department, so I am expected make my own decisions regarding tools & projects. There are four subsidiary companies owned by the holding company that issues my paycheck, so when I am asked to make a case for a large spend, it helps that usually only 25% of the cost is allocated to any one company's budget.

I came from a culture where I often needed approval from all members of the operating board before I could make a purchase or move forward with a project. I once waited three weeks for the CFO to approve a few small tweaks in a tertiary color palette. Needless to say, my current environment is a breath of fresh air.

At a previous role, I was tasked with starting marketing efforts from scratch for a 20 year old tech SMB. They had little to no marketing efforts in place. To start, I knew I needed a platform to help get everything in one place, all of the miscellaneous social accounts, email data, creative, etc.

To get buy-in from the CEO, I had to learn the customer base first, to understand who our best client were, so we could be pointed in the direction of those same types of clients. I presented information to the CEO that he didn't even know about his own customers to help prove which industries and types of businesses to market to. He thought he know his client base, and while on a personal and product based level he did, the holistic picture I painted for him regarding customers/products and services/our employees, gave him a completely different picture. And with that, I gained buy-in to use a marketing platform that would allow us to effectively target new clients and nurture current clients.

Twitter: @mrs_dublin

Twitter: @ajsedlak

Sometimes the only way to get something is through a skunkworks initiative. I spent a lot of personal time working on something that I knew wouldn't be able to do solely with company time. I p[itched a timeframe to be done and made sure it happened. In the end it was about 40% personal time and has totally been worth it for the time and frustration it has saved me and my colleagues.

I'm just trying to get a Golden Ticket, man. @tfhackett

Twitter: @wentzelam

I'm actually working on this right now!

I started a new position as a web designer/developer at a small business contractor for state government. Our creative team consists of 3 designers who work with a team of 4 project managers. I'm the only one with a graphic design/marketing/email/social media background, so when one of our clients expressed interest in building an email newsletter template I was only too happy to jump on board.

Our contract stipulates that we use a particular platform (name redacted), so I learned how to navigate and manage the client's account and worked with our marketing manager/project manager to set up email assets. The platform has several drawbacks that makes it difficult to work with and produce nice emails in a quick turnaround time; half the time I had to email their support team so that they could write additional code so that my code would work - it added days to the process. The clients that do use the platform loathe it.

A couple months ago we hit a "perfect storm" of opportunity. A group of clients had requested a media hub that would be responsible for all incoming and outgoing communications, including email, text, voice notifications, that had an admin user interface. We said that we could build one in house, but that opened up the possibility of finding an ESP that worked better - not just with our proposed platform, but as a standalone product - and was much cheaper. It also helped that the contract with the current platform was up for renewal, and they were raising their prices for the same package deal.

I took the initiative to research potential ESPs that would work using a short list of requirements, based on the project demands given by the clients. I narrowed down a list of 5-6 and made my recommendation to the CEO/President and Vice President. Since then, I've been unofficially "owning" this project and leading the team, collaborating with people mentioned previously and our CIO.

We've got several other big ticket projects to get through the pipeline first, but I hope we can start development on this project later this year. With any luck, I might be able to submit a Litmus Live speaker proposal next year!

I work for a small nonprofit and we're in the midst of a complete redesign of our websites and order management system... it became painfully clear 2 years ago that we needed to revamp our model, so getting buy-in actually wasn't too tough. We're moving to a Magento-powered system and the cost is steep... but we have a solid donor base and have been fortunate to raise the money we need for the overhaul. The new system will go live in about 6 months and I absolutely cannot wait to sink my teeth into the new email marketing tools! @msplaykate

twitter: @breanne_brady

When our team decided we wanted all of our clients to have responsive emails we wanted to make coding emails easy for everyone involved. Everyone wasn’t quite comfortable with responsive coding, and we wanted to take advantage of snippets.

I designed master templates with corresponding cheatsheets of snippet libraries, code fixes and google fonts to match different clients’ branding. Coding turnaround time is quicker and our team is totally taking advantage of snippets and Builder.

Testing creative and using analytics to show how it can work and what it will take to make it work. Getting buy-in on an idea is always better when I feel I'm passionate about the idea and I've done all my homework on pros and cons. Twitter: @JoyBethy

@eli_elinasos

Well, F16 was absolutely remarkable in terms of email QA improvements. We have introduced super-rigorous QA process, which includes: email clients testing (through Litmus), source code testing (through Builder) and strict email approval sign off process, which was created based on the tips from last year's session on Email Team's process. We ended up creating whole new role - Email QA Analyst!!!

Nothing creates buy-in better than data. Budgets are tight, and we often need to "prove" the value of adopting a new tool or solution prior to implementing it. This is true regardless of whether we're discussing adopting a responsive email design (first, let's check out how many of our email recipients are opening email on mobile devices), prioritizing email design for specific email clients (Microsoft Outlook 2007 is the front-runner for us), or adjustments to our email design or tone (holy cow! that email performed 4x better than the other tests). Our time is valuable -- we need to prioritize how we spend it, and data is the key.

Twitter: @BeingCarolyn

I have worked on a variety of email programs, in a variety of industries for a variety of clients. The one thing that seems to work well for me when obtaining buy-in to improve a specific tool, project, approach, or anything else to bring my email marketing to the next level, is to communicate results, or potential results in the form of clear, easy-to-understand reports. While getting a meeting set-up for these types of improvements is not always easy, as decision makers are often busy, having an easy-to-look-at report supported with relevant graphics and digestible content, can easily go 'viral' within the company. When done the right way, these reports can create a buzz of excitement around the purposed solution, or in the very least create questions that lead to a follow-up meeting the discuss further. - @AmandaKiviaho

Twitter: @philsi

At my previous role way back in the old days of 2011/2012 when people were starting to look at mobile optimised email, I ran a lunchtime session with a variety of real world devices (early Android, iPhone 4 I think!) and showed how optimised emails looked better. This helped persuade our pure marketing colleagues who didn't have as much tech understanding what mobile optimised was, what media queries do, how they work what was possible and how much better it looked, but also explained how it was slower (initially) to design and build. It also helped my career as I wasn't just saying "we're doing this, it will take longer", which meant longer term I was more trusted than some IT colleagues who had the "we're doing this, tough luck" approach at the time.

Normally asking works for me. I work at a direct marketing agency who is aware of the importance of email for our clients. If it doesn’t work, a well designed slideshow with some animations/interactions will do the trick :)

@thiagoferreira

A live demo and a good visual representation of the features you have to offer is a great way to get buy-in. The personalized approach that is used also plays a big role in the buy-in process and your knowledge on the topic will make it or break it.
From experience I think that timing is the single most important factor, because I may not need something now, but who knows if in the near future this need would arise. There are also business constraints that will affect your willingness to spend money on services (ex. at the end of fiscal years, companies are usually more likely to spend their remaining budgets on your proposed services or products, not because your service is needed but because the budget needs to be spent).

Twitter @MGSayah

Analytics! Analytics! Analytics! That was key to convincing a recent client to stop sending batches of marketing email via Microsoft Outlook (using the bcc field no less!). Once we were able to show them the insights, demographics and detailed reports for a typical campaign, they were sold. We hardly broke a sweat! ;-)

Twitter: @dwayneroper

Twitter: @Lukes_Tweets says

For a recent client project, I needed to get buy in to build a new abandoned cart email series using app integrations for Shopify to the ESP. Most clients are afraid that sending multiple reminders would annoy customers. To convince them to move forward I took a snap shot of how many sales were being recovered with the current reminder based on last 90 days. They were getting roughly 10% to 15% per month in recovered sales. I pulled historical and recent case studies from industry sources such as Listrak's annual Internet Retailer 1000 email practices report for last several years, case studies from SeeWhy and other abandonment solutions, IBM Silverpop case studies and articles from Industry Blogs like this one: https://litmus.com/blog/how-to-make-a-cart-abandonment-email-sandwich or this one: https://litmus.com/blog/nothing-in-email-marketing-is-set-it-and-forget-it.

Using all this data and research, I showed that many successful retailers are using a 3 email series to capture 20% to 40% of sales and presented that in a deck to the client - with a focus on similar email programs. I ended with an analysis using the same 90 days worth of data I started with and showed how much more revenue and orders they could recapture at 20%, 30% and 40% recovery rates expected post-project. Using this "proof" I demonstrated not only would the project generate enough gross revenue to break even in under 90 days, but it would do so after using a factor of 65% to 75% of revenue being allotted to cost of goods sold (COGS) - in other words, generally the project would be PROFITABLE in under 90 days of implementation. Both clients I used this with signed, one hit project profitability in under 2 months, the other launches in the next few days.

So my advice is to do your homework, compute your numbers and show to decision-makers how your idea will profit the company in the near future - I normally use 90-120 days. Once they see how it works using realistic numbers, you can usually get a yes. I have also used similar techniques with former employers when I already had a tentative yes but was constantly bumped for other projects to make mine a priority so it gets done rather than lip service.

I work for an ecommerce company. We have several different clients that we manage email programs for. As a very small team, it can be hard for us to manage the large number of promotional or ad hoc email requests we get on a weekly basis. Over the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of companies switching to a more automated and collaborative email approach.

I spent a lot of time in late 2016 scoping out this project and getting buy-in from other team members. At first there was resistance due to the additional steps that would be required by other team members, but after easing them into the process, I was able to help them better understand the amount of time we were saving as a team. I was also able to use this approach when getting buy-in from upper management. There was a small cost in resources that we understand will allow us to work on more revenue driving emails in the future and work on projects that typically fall to the side during our peak send times.

@Maylynne969

@danbranstrator

Easy. Numbers. It's always numbers. If I can explain how this is going to save us money or make us money, I'm golden. <--- (see what I did there?)

Ok so first of all im from Poland, small country in Europe :)

My country is very specific :) not only in politics :) but in email marketing also.

Sorry for my english :) its not so good as i want to but i will try to answer clearly.

To improve our email marketing, we must watch "You've Got Email" and try not to cry : )

Seriously we must read everything we can and do many many tests then hit send button.

The main thing we can do is testing, testing , testing and once more testing... because a lot of yours improvements didn't work in our "environment" :)

In Poland we have many providers, but many of them still uses old engines to render the massages. Of course we have many users in gmail etc but...

Of course conferences are a great idea but in Poland we have only one conference with the main subject of email marketing :)

Twitter: @rudifela

Getting buy-in for Litmus from my employer was easy as we had a clear need for email client compatibility testing. My practice in general is to present the business case for any additional tools I need; I've had pretty decent luck with that approach.

Twitter: @kjsahakian

Hi Team,

It was few year back when I was working as web/Designer +SEO role for a Healthcare Startup, the company is having its own product for cancer patient[ICancerHealth] for Android and Ios version. My role is to manage the corporate site and developing the product pages along with managing the email campaign for all the patient who is using the App.

Initially, they were not getting much response on email as they are sending emails which are not polished in terms of personalised content, lead activity and lead specific preferences.

As an experiment, I have started designing some interactive mockup for all the outgoing emails, started using dynamic logics to make it more personalised, started to maintain a lead lifecycle to enhance they accountability towards the Application.

In few rounds of email shoot we were getting some amount of increment in open rates and click rates, started shooting an email with new product features, updates, and upcoming feature to add-on in the product to keep the customer curious and connected with the company.

Twitter:@adesrala.

I work as a freelancer providing mobile optimized emails for my clients. Each client has a different set of requirements for email client support and I rely heavily on Litmus to know that the product I provide to my clients will render properly based on their requirements. I typically write an email in Sublime and I find the builder to be a great tool to troubleshoot individual issues with a coded email. Ability to export samples for client sign-off is also very handy.
Twitter: @jkeene1866

Twitter: @Hurstdiddy

In my experience, to gain buy-in, saving on costs has been a huge factor. It also doesn't hurt to present a well prepared presentation for your proposed project, approach or software service. Present Prepared Presentation Proposed Project...say that five times fast!

I do A/B testing on new ideas and then share the results via a Monday morning email. We know from watching email openings and clicks that are Friday emails have about a 30 hour lifespan. I'll then present the results to our team and ask for feedback. Once approved, I'll then go teach my email creating colleagues and show them the data behind that decision.

@alagoodman

Twitter: @sbi85

It's just hard numbers. I tend to focus on showing the ROI of such tool, either if it's saving time, improving effectiveness or directly impacting topline profit. Everything can be quantified and it's reaaaaly hard to fight hard cold facts. But of course it does help to be confident and smile a lot.

Short answer: having the analytics and data to back up why it's a good idea.

Twitter: @burtem1

We're a small team (basically just me and whatever designer time I can steal), so anything that I can show will multiply my efforts or make them more effective is worth trying.

Twitter: @philipwright

As a freelance email developer and consultant the ability to preview all the email templates I build is part of my technical requirements when taking on a new contract for a client. Simple! Otherwise it's like asking an electrician to do a job in a place without electricity or inviting a concert pianist to perform without providing a piano.

@AnnetteWalkerUK

Twitter: @Mr_Deckard

My team recently automated our demand generation emails. This was a huge undertaking which required a ton of teamwork and skill sets. I was responsible for designing the email templates' framework and visual design, and admittedly, I designed two templates that were somewhat complicated requiring background images and mobile image swaps.

The templates looked great and my goal was to align them visually with the rest of our brand, primarily our website. However, my team was reluctant to implement them given their complexity. I setup up A/B tests with simpler designs and wrote and produced very specific asset spec guides for our creative stakeholders to follow.

The A/B tests proved my hypothesis, that the more visually engaging templates would perform better, and my team was impressed with the level of detailed instructions in the asset spec guides I made. We implemented the designs I made and have since had overall incredible results with our new dynamic email engine.

@mattlockhart

The company I work for offers a whole slew of marketing and transactional email templates to our customers via our CRM. When I was put in charge of redesigning and incorporating them into our new system I knew I needed litmus. Showing how difficult it can be to get emails to display properly across clients and devices and how incredibly important it was for us to do so made selling the idea of a litmus subscription quite easy. It has saved us countless hours and lots of money. Not to mention it makes my life a whole lot easier!

Twitter: DayTimeSweet

I wanted to change our email templates but I couldn't get them into our creative department's queue. So I partnered with a co-worker and we came up with a few new template designs on our own and presented them to our creative department. We didn't end up using those templates, but it showed the creative team that we were serious about wanting new designs, so they began making us new templates!

I was able to get buy-in by sharing email's amazing ROI with the decision-maker. Showing how preheaders was a bonus! Our Twitter handle is @CountessGroup

The need to move to a responsive layout was a no-brainer for us and so was a tool to test our email...

@dctosch

Twitter: kat__don

Our email marketing team prides itself on building all our tools ourselves. However, we wanted to include dynamic timers in shipping cutoff emails for holiday, as we've created confusion in the past for customers. We researched a bunch of different options, presented pricing, and mock creative of what the email could look like with our brand team, and most importantly ran it by our customer experience team. Having done our diligence, as well as including feedback from non-email stakeholders (the CX team), helped bring our idea to life, get people excited by it, and get it approved!

In just 2 years, our email program has grown exponentially, and we're starting to outgrow our current email marketing system. Due to the limitations we've been recently running into with our current system, it was pretty easy to earn buy-in! I'm now researching different systems and going through demos to find a good one that can handle our robust and unique email program.
@nikkirosko

Twitter: @KaylaAtZaycon

We were fortunate at my company to get a CMO who understands the value of good email marketing, and for us, email is responsible for the bulk of our revenue. So we take it seriously! A buy-in was no question as we work on migrating over to a new esp with more flexibility and relational capabilities. It wasn't too difficult to get the buy-in once we had the other execs understanding the importance of it and seeing the impact that improvements have on our campaigns. Our email marketing has come such a long way since I started in 2014--it's a constantly evolving beast! :) Excited for the future.

There was a need to improve on the overall design of our clients Newsletters which at the time were just plain emails with a bunch of links in them. Through my design background, and the knowledge that i have learned through litmus and other resources, we were able to design and code up a beautiful Dynamic and Responsive Newsletter for our clients. Once our clients saw the design and flow of the Newsletter work, they were sold!

@LottjrRichard

I've found that the biggest factors in getting buy-in related to email marketing are to be able to show knowledge/expertise in the subject as well as to showing how what is being proposed will directly benefit the organization.

When pushing my organization away from image only email layouts, it was not enough just to say "this is not best practice". What was effective, however, was being able to articulate the impact of changing our templates as well as having studies and thought leaders (not to mention our own internal tests) to point to in order to show the benefit.

@danielvolk

I managed to get buy-in to use some pretty nifty gifs and movable ink features to soup up some of our acquisition emails, despite having to work against some pretty steady and conservative testing with acquisition emails.

@mellywellington

@realrenedupont

Pros and cons list with some infographic'y data points have always helped significantly with buy-in on projects!

Mostly showing them visuals and letting them see how we're failing on Litmus, 's all. Twitter : @its_dimitri_f_

At my company we've been in the process of rebranding for the past few month with everything set to go live in the coming weeks. Our new website has been designed as mobile first and our email campaigns had to follow suit. I had a contractor we were working, who is a long term Litmus user, show management how previous untested campaigns had displayed across a variety of mobile devices. Following this buy in was easy!

Twitter: @AlexOgilvie_

The VP of one of our sister companies wanted to start sending blank marketing emails with all the messaging inside an attached PDF instead of in the body of the email. (Mind you, this wasn't 1996, this was 2016.) He was convinced that if he could just hit "Open attachment" that it would aid in viewing emails on mobile. I mocked up two versions of the same email, one using a campaign built in Mailchimp and the other an attached PDF. Once he and his team were able to test it, he was quick to realize how frustrating and antiquated his idea was.

@Mable314

I was on a team that built our own in-house email marketing tool, and our buy-in process required the approval of the heads of multiple departments within our huge company (over 10K employees globally). We had to create templates that were elegant and modular, that were on brand, and that would be buildable and scalable to future template designs by our engineering team. What helped was having a functional design comp to help sell not only the aesthetics, but also the functionality of a process that would be a vast improvement over the previous one.

@boremhipsum

Tim Gelinas
@gelinas260

When I started at my current position our primary email deliverable was an Outlook OFT file.

Yeah.

Just getting over the hurdle of the limitations involved in that deliverable was a task. If you've never had the joy of crafting emails to send specifically from Outlook to the rest of the world...well I wish that on no person. All the tricks of the trade, responsive email patterns, analytics - all of it gone in the world of OFT files.

In recent months we've been successful in migrating clients towards more successful means of email delivery and the immediate return of analytics is what is helping to open the eyes of the team at large.

-Tim

Twitter: @tracyjeans

Data! I work at a community college, and we have so much data about our prospective student email campaigns, which are beautiful and recently redesigned. Our emails to current students, though, have gone out through a very outdated system that manages, somehow, to send non-mobile-responsive text-only emails (sigh). So we gathered data and boom! Got the go-ahead to contract with a different service that is going to let us do really 21st-century things like track opens and click-throughs- so we'll have more data! We've got a lovely mobile-responsive html template ready to go live any day now!

Amy Blacker
@Amydanceblacker

I think analyzing the data that can show trends of what your constituents want helps, If you have the facts of the effectiveness of your current strategy people are more open to changing what is not working and can see opportunities for growth and improvement themselves

Twitter: @jessicagmendoza

Quite frankly haven't gotten company buy-in yet for any new email marketing tool - we are on a three year contract and anything else would have to come during a review period of various vendors. How other vendors we've used have gotten buy-in is through trials or proof of concept if it's tied to a project.

@tobjosmulleros says: It is always the same argument, that convinces team leaders and business stakeholders: What saves time and improves quality (yes, both at the same time) will lead to greater profit. And that's what it all about.

As a designer, it can be easy to approach an email with creative motivations, as a strong visual narrative is vital in providing a positive experience to our customers. However, this isn't the same primary goal within other teams. There are business goals that need to be considered as well.

My team had proposed using custom imagery over preexisting product photography for a new email we were working on. In order to get buy in from marketing and acquisition stakeholders, we provided a business case that specifically explained the potential margins we could expect with this new, custom creative. Ultimately, by working cross functionally and considering the different goals of the email, we were able to get sign off on the idea and move forward.

twitter: @anoradaexplorer

In a previous role I converted all of our emails into responsive designs so we could reach bigger audiences in the burgeoning mobile climate as it was then. I've also implemented animated GIFs in headers, in the form of cinemagraphs, which bring a degree of subtle interest without being too overpowering. Twitter @valkyriae76

@not_that_weird

As a creative agency, we were "the kids" playing with play-doh in the eyes of our biggest client, a retailer that already worked with consullting services in orther to create plans and comunication for their clients.
We started pushing best practices in content, design, way of working and revealing better results than the expected even by us in various of our actions.
All of that sending +10 different emails/segmented emails manually without an automatization tool neither a cms for our content hubs.
That helped us to demosntrate that "the kids" weren't the kids any more, and that the tools we were trying to sell them weren't just toys or something we qnated, but sonething we were using in order to make them sell more.
Right now we are on the count down to start using an email automatization tool and in the planning phase of an ad hoc cms tool

@crsteinbach

I got buy-in for enhancing an email marketing program by tying the goals and objectives of the program to the goals and objectives of the organization. That way too, when we were reporting on specific campaigns, we knew exactly the functional and strategic areas where affected and could then know better where our strengths and weaknesses lied.

Twitter: @MattMediaDesign

After attending Salesforce Connections last year, I realized we needed we needed more personalization in our emails. This was especially highlighted in a session hosted by Justine from Litmus. She made it clear that email marketing is always evolving, and that personalization is the key to engaging subscribers.

I was able to present information from the conference to my company's stakeholders to get them to buy-in to a new approach of personalization. We invested in product recommendation expansion, which we feature in one dedicated email per week. We also feature smaller product recommendation sections in many of our daily marketing emails, and in our welcome journey for new subscribers. Our email revenue has increased by over 20% YOY since implementing the new approach!

At a previous job I introduced an email welcome campaign in a non-profit, professional organization. The first step for me was acceptance - the realization that email marketing is still heavily seen as a quick-turn, one-off, sugar-high push channel. I was able to get buy-in by doing the following:

1. Share: Show what you do now, and what's wrong with it
2. Excite: Show what you cand do, and how it can fix the wrongs
3. Educate: Show how you can accomplish #2
4. Achieve: Benchmark KPIs that you would like to impact

@uncwemp71

I'm an email developer for a European ESP and have been eyeballing this software that blows our own reporting and deliverability tools out of the water. I've been making my case for a POC with the software company but still needed a client to sign off for a trial with this new software. I wouldn't say it was tough to get them to sign because the benefits really are that much better, but I still had to make my case and now we have a running POC and possibly a reseller relationship with the software in mention. Being part of this is amazing because not only will it be great to offer something much better, but it will most likely also increase performance on our clients email marketing

Twitter: @rallemis

@carltontorres

Unfortunately, I'm an email noob (10 months deep) and my team at Whereoware already had a great suite of tools for email creation, quality assurance, and analytics.

Fortunately, I've worked with some clients who didn't know about some of the awesome things you can do in email whether it's data driven personalization or tricks in Photoshop like making GIFs or other animations. After a demo with a client showing how great dynamic content can be, they decided to start using it and they have been able to create more targeted emails and spend less time ensuring email A goes to group A and email B goes to group B when they only have subtle differences.

My company (Movable Ink) invented the ability to change email content at the moment of open, so every email we send needs to set an example for our customers and prospects. As Content Marketing Manager, I'm constantly trying to come up with new, creative campaigns that inspire our audience. To get buy-in on new ideas, I work closely with a designer to mock up a campaign, and then present it to my marketing team. I'll discuss the end goal and how the campaign's design supports that goal. (Our goals pretty specific - for example, a goal for an email campaign could be to influence 10 new opportunities with prospects, generate 50 ebook downloads, etc.) Often the design will incorporate GIFs in addition to other contextual elements, so we always have a fallback version of a campaign to ensure that it renders well across platforms. Once an idea is approved by the team, we test, test, test to ensure the final campaign looks great.

@KristenWritesIt

Recently I called a meeting with all of the stakeholders about our antiquated templating system on our transactional emails. I was able to streamline the number of templates we use (as templates! Imagine that!), though my longer-term goal of a new transactional system is still pending. @rubissima

Building a business case is an important component of getting buy-in. I work for an agency and always need to get buy-in wether it's an internal initiative or for client work. In one recent situation, I made a discovery regarding a client's database quality that could have a significant impact on the success of our program. I considered the potential impact of taking action immediately versus postponing the additional auditing and cleansing process. In the end I ended up identifying requirements and known constraints, developed options and then evaluated the pros and cons to come up with a recommended course of action to minimize negative impact and potential cost while improving our client's overall email marketing efforts.

Twitter: @gwynnemurphy

The best way to get buy in for any change you want to make in email marketing is to use the show and tell method. I have found that marketers in general have trouble conceptualizing new concepts and tools. Rather than have endless meetings where someone tries to explain the concepts showing the tool or design prototype goes a long way. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words a prototype is worth 1,000,000.

Twitter @IamGrimus

Twiiter: @CastineDesigns
At my current job, when I want a new tool, i will research the tool then do a write up on how much time/money this will save for our branch. If i can't prove the price is worth the rewards, it is really hard to get buy in from upper leadership. For a new approach, I will just run with it then show the results to my manager. For instance, i created a bunch of templates for our email account for anyone to use. Then people were going to my manager and saying how much they loved them. So it opened the door to allow me to do even more with the email platform that we use. I am lucky in that my boss does allow me to try things out without approving every little thing.

In the earlier days of responsive email design, I used Litmus analytics tracking to show my managers how many of our customers were reading their emails on mobile devices. This made it much easier for me to not only justify the time I was spending learning new responsive techniques, but also to get others within the organization to be okay with our emails looking different in various contexts and devices.

Twitter: @ThomasGrimes

To get buy-in I'm a big fan of creating a straightforward PowerPoint slide deck that shows:
1. The current situation/challenge
2. Options for addressing the situation/challenge
3. A recommendation for how to move forward

Include screen shots, data, examples of customer feedback, etc.

Share a very good draft with your boss first, and talk about who else needs to see a refined version in order to get buy-in. Improve the slides, and share with others as needed. Make it happen.

Twitter: @dmdoran

With Litmus rendering pages we were able to design our emails to be very eye appealing to almost all of our database.

@vcarlam_

@BrendaGarciaMus

We started using Litmus Analytics when we move to mobile friendly and responsible emails. No we save time because we have templates who looks good in all email clients.

I am able to get the buy-in if we can provide metrics on how changing to this new tool or approach can improve our process or we can achieve better results for the campaigns. It is important that what we are introducing is simple, can improve their process, and that its scalable.
Twitter: @cdalmas

@ambci

I collect samples of awesome emails and research how we could potentially implement them for our non profit. We 've had a few vendors come in and give us demos. We are currently putting together use case scenarios for our VP to justify a new product. Our marketing managers are putting together a report on potential ROI and how we will be measuring success of new implementations.

Personally I try to stay up to date on email and spread my knowledge internally. When I do ask for something that will bring our game up, I feel this helps with credibility and my suggestions will be given due consideration.

Twitter: @GraceSmalley

After noticing a drop in email engagement it was import to try to develop a communication strategy that stood out from our competitors. I knew that with our target audience we could afford to do something innovative fun and engaging.

I attended conference that was particularly insiprining. Seeing how other sectors we're optimising and utilising email filled me with great ideas and I was excited to start implementing these. The biggest concern, was making sure everyone was as enthusiastic as me and that we could all work together to produce something great.

To get everyone bought into the idea it was import to wait for the right campaign. I didn't want the idea to be wasted, I wanted it to be part of a strategic campaign that really made a difference to our engament.

I researched further into the idea that I had, gathering campaign examples and stats. I wanted to have material to support the idea I really believed in.

An opportunity come up for me to suggest the idea. I presented the examples and presented that stats. Everyone loved the idea and it was decided that we'd run with it. As well as the supporting material, I believe that my enthusiasm from the conference and my passion to implent an innovative idea went a long way in getting the rest of the team to be bought into the idea.

A campaign came up which

Twitter: @Erin_Grace

I work in higher education, which means we can be a little behind in the creative realm. Thankfully, I work in the admissions office so our audience is high school students, who are COMPLETELY up to date on the coolest, newest, greatest things in technology. They expect the best when it comes to our communications and we are expected to deliver that. To get buy-in from those who make bigger decisions than me, all we have to do is show what the kids are doing these days. Also, mocking up visuals always help. This usually gets us buy-in to help take our email marketing to the next level. Also, showing what Litmus and it's community are doing to stay on the forefront of email, is a great selling point too ;)

twitter: tabi_thag

I was working at a pretty poorly run company and money was tight. I saw that we were spending WAY WAY too much on our ESP for the amount of subscribers we had, and how many emails we sent out (maybe 1-3 per client a month). I went full on research mode for about a month, and got cost-breakdowns for every ESP I could find, and laid it all out for my supervisors + CEO. Gave them a presentation about why I wanted to use the ESP that I did, and how much money we'd be saving over time for a better ESP with more functionality. That won them over, and we switched over 100+ accounts last summer.

Twitter: @ericlepetitsf

In the past it would take us "forever" to get from pitching an idea to executing it - a lot of them were rejected. Now we have a different approach based on "quick wins" => we build a proof of concept very quickly, test it with simple use cases and targeted audience, analyze the results and if it is conclusive we invest in dev/qa/creative resources to build a more advanced / polished email and send it to a larger audience.

Performing robust A/B testing and proving out the hypotheses with real data! Never fails!
@mikerubylux

Prove that the existing process is flawed or needs improving, that an existing technology will not address the needs, and show how the new tool/project/approach/etc will. Bonus points if the new tool will 1) save the company money, or 2) have an improved impact on sales teams. This approach worked for getting Litmus, switching MAPs, adding Enterprise level support for one of our tools, etc.

twitter: @erikaywong

Most of my clients unfortunately do not care about the email campaigns despite them being a major part of their marketing strategy. The way I approach the buy-in factor or adding new things to the email campaigns in most cases is by doing it and seeing the results. 90% of the time it is not noticed but with the minor tweaks and sometimes big changes I am kicking some goals and converting people one email at a time! Slow and steady wins the race. @benuhlmann

Twitter: @distur_bat

You know how pricing starts to ramp up when you get to extra large numbers of contacts in your lists? (If you don't I dare you to click on the Custom Plan or anything alike in the Pricing tab of any well-known ESP). At 8M+ emails sent monthly your Management becomes really reluctant to buy-in any additional features. That's where naked statistics becomes your only tool of persuasion.
It turned out that language preferences are hard to choose for some users and a pretty high number of readers couldn't make their decision to choose Chinese as the default language of mailings received from our company and kept on using language selector manually in each Newsletter. This put a higher load on our Dev and Analytics teams and presumably lowered the sales in some Chinese-speaking regions.
Byuing-in a geo-location feature enabled us to automatically sort the language-related segments and elevate the unnecessary loads to support the system.

Twitter: @lvlamasan

I have only been with my company a little over a year, and they already had a fantastic workflow set up for email development. In the future I would love to work on continuing to improve that by showing just how much efficient processes can help improve everyones life as well as the bottom line.

I explained what I wanted to do, showed a proof of concept and got others in the organization to buy-in to the goals of the project. That way I got an R&D budget approved so we could start developing the tool.

Twitter: @dcaro12

@winningprice

Receiving buy-in for a project I was working on took initiative on my part. When my manager and salesperson saw that I had a vested interest in the project and was not reactive, but proactive, they were both on board.

Twitter: @ClintonWilmott

Working as a freelancer buy-in can be tough. I've found the best way to convince clients to get a product or service they need is to get an active demo account. Showing them all the features that would ultimately improve workflow and generally make their lives easier works. I've had this happen recently with Litmus. Clients were blown away. They had no idea Litmus existed or that testing email rendering was even possible.

Now they can be like the cool kids. With their very own account.

It really depends on what your company goals are in terms of technology is for the next few years and somehow integrating certain features of a tool to fit those goals. Currently, we're really looking into automation for customer journey touch points in order to provide a seamless overall customer experience. To make that happen, we need to ensure the tools we're looking into can help us view the overall customer journey but also deep dive into each of the different touch points we want to achieve. Once we have an idea of a number of various services/softwares that are able to cater to our needs (either from them reaching out to us or we reaching out to them), we present and compare the tools to senior levels. It's really seeing what best fits our needs within a reasonable budget and what extra features can they apply just for us (ex. more robust analytics/reporting).

Twitter username: @joywang_

For me as a Digital Designer is important to be able to be on top of the game when it comes to creativity and being able to create emails that will engage clients to connect/contact with us, it's all about making people open and read your emails especially when you design responsive emails so they will look good on mobile as well as desktop and having you guys it makes it easier to see our emails before they go out and buying Litmus was a not brainer.

Twitter: @vmae711

Twitter: @teekatwo

When I wanted new software that was going to improve and speed up the creation of emails, the visual layout. I showed them how much trouble I was having with my current software and how much predicted time I could save with the upgrade. Since I was using the software on my own machine at home I was "living proof" of the new software. In the grand scheme of the company it wasn't the most expensive part and so the buy-in wasn't that vast to begin with.

twitter: bencomicgraphics

I showed the time I needed to do testing manually with various devices on my desk plus opening and having to install and get licenses for various software like versions of Outlook, etc. The mess on my desk of different devices ranging from Windows Phones, iPhones, and old blackberries made the desk unsightly in the office, and I kept pushing for Litmus to be used as a replacement.

Twitter: @MaureenCousin_o

Just this year I was able to convince my company's owner to add SilverPop web tracking to our websites. We had been using Google Analytics as long as I can remember but utilizing the web tracking within SP, we are able to see a more comprehensive view of what our readers do after they click. May sound obvious to us email marketers but sitting down those higher-ups and showing them how we can follow a readers path through our websites after a click was all it took for them to give us the go-ahead.

Simply showing and explaining how much time I can save by using tools like Litmus that allow me to test many many clients at once. :) It's usually an argument like "I can spend my time doing x,y,z more than I do now" @kittehluvs

@rickysullivan
We still haven't figure this out yet. We've only recently moved to responsive emails using Zurb's Foundation email framework and using Litmus for testing.
Hopefully this year, our email marketing will be a strong tool for direct sales.

Whenever I've required something for work I've always put together a solid argument for it. Whether that's in the form of something formal like a presentation, or just talking frankly with colleagues and showing how the idea can work - @B3ddoes

Twitter: @TheLoloHart
In order to allow for budget and time to redesign all of our email templates we had to show how over 60% of our consumers open their emails on mobile devices. This gave us the ammo we needed to overhaul the design to be clean and responsive.

Twitter: @paulbcurious

Getting my agency to use HTML email in 2016 was a lot more difficult than I could have imagined. The idea was easy. But the application and the workflow even to this day have been a daily struggle to get the whole team on board. The buy-in has been a slow process of chipping away at the traditional form of sending out email in this agency...with JPGs...

I include new elements and more efficiencies with each email, and the associated workflow to make it less of a burden on the team.

I've shown my managers and clients the potential of interactivity and accessibility by proof of concepts and how new this is to share with clients and convinced them with numbers.

Cheers,

@wilbertheinen

Just trial and error is what really brought my email marketing to the next level. When I first started out as an email developer at my company, I had no idea what I was doing. Then after trial and error and a lot of Litmus tests, I now know the ins and outs of email marketing/development and will never look back.

@dre711

Twitter @dzewt

Ever since signing up for a Litmus account... I was able to convince my marketing team to overhaul their email workflow and use responsive, accessible emails. We sent quite a number to small segments, so builder and checklist have been integral. Thank you Litmus :)

I started a new job in January, and realised they had no templates (vs just flat email files) whatsoever -- it was causing huge bottlenecks with the one existing coder. The way that I got buy-in for me to code up the templates in Exact Target was to pitch that a: other non-coders would be able to build emails, and b: more people knowing about email would increase it's ROI and eliminate bottlenecks.

It's working thus far, since I'm building out the templates today! :)

My twitter handle is @asoehnlen :D

@EmailMarket_tng

Email Marketing is a very small department in my company. It's just me! This is great because it allows me to work creatively and efficiently with other members of the team, including leadership. I've been able to focus on more independent projects and research.

For buy-ins, I create my own email templates for proposals and send these to the management team for review. I thought, what better way to show them what I'd like to do than with what I already do?

Our email department has been outdated in previous years. Once I moved into this role, I was able to create new email templates, an organized workflow, and I was able to educate my co-workers. By helping people around me understand what I do, I've been able to have more discussions with the company as a whole. Creating optimized email template proposals with my approach or special project has really helped get the conversation started.

Getting a buy-in for me has been about showing the benefits that it will bring to the company or the team. Bringing examples or potential examples of what it could do work especially for the high up people that don't completely understand your job. At my last job I signed up for a litmus trial and sent a couple of the emails i was working on to show my boss the benefit of the software, it sure beat walking around the office and finding each QA person and seeing what email client they had.

Twitter: @KittensEmail2

I use a similar method every time. I build a prototype of what I'm trying to do. Use that as a demo to show how great it is (time saving, cost saving, revenue generating, etc.). It hasn't failed yet :)

Twitter: @viv_fu

I work in a team of one for a online retailer company. Getting buy-in is always important because having the right tools can improve my work flow. Looking at current ROI of an email series then being able to demonstrate a higher ROI during the "trial/demo" period of the software/tool management seem to be on board. I would use the new tool/software and implement it into my current work flow. I will also schedule in a meeting to step my manager through the new process and show them the benefits of the new product. I have found if I can prove that if Saves time, increases revenue or benefits our customers then the buy-in happen a lot easier.

I'm lucky that I work for an org that really understands the value of email, so it's simply a case of making a case to the product team and clearly presenting what I'm after before we create a test scenario before rolling out the new email/improved email/etc.

I've previously worked in companies where that hasn't been the case, which has made things much more challenging. In those scenarios it's really all about making things happen by yourself to the best of your abilities before providing results to management to try get buy-in.

Twitter: iamacyborg

Using analytics to show the facts of our campaign we were able to make upgrades. In 2016, we were able to go responsive after showing majority are on mobile. This also helped us sell mobile landing pages.

@sdegroot9

Buy-in is overall quite hard to come by in my job. However as they say... "If you don't ask, the answer is always >>> no."
Often to get buy-in requires development of a demonstrative POC, or putting forth a persuasive business case for the need. Testing is obviously of critical importance to client success as well as our own, even still, harder won than you might imagine.

In ever changing landscape, you can never really allow yourself to get too comfortable. Consume mass quantities of tips, tricks and user know-how whenever you are able, and be ready to make your case when you see opportunity to get a leg-up on your game. Like this "Golden Ticket" here ;)
Good luck all!

Twitter handle: @steve_houk_50

I've done this a few times, with the pitch of saving time and/or improving accuracy. As the only person in our org who builds emails, I was getting overwhelmed and confused—and dropping balls—because people would email or sometimes even chat me with requests, resulting in many back-and-forths. I decided I needed to have everyone fill out a quick form so that I could get all the info I need in one place, consistently. I tested it out with one coworker, worked out some kinks, and then launched it to everyone else. The buy-in came after the fact, when it was easy for people to see how much quicker and more accurate the whole process became. And how much less stressed I was!

Twitter handle: @NTENerin

Data, data, data! I can usually get enough buy-in to try something out, but keeping an idea moving forward sustainably is harder. By demonstrating concrete conversions through analytics, I've been able to shift resources pretty effectively — even if that means shifting them away from projects that didn't work.

Twitter: @evancmo

A few years ago I did a proof-of-concept for a request to include a current weather forecast in a ski report email. The client was not happy with the Outlook font fallbacks and wanted to stay on brand, so I decided to come up with a way to include an image on the fly. I found a solution, implemented it and the client was pleased. The solution included two subscription services to make this work and those were approved (not to mention all of the development hours). At the same time this client also approved a subscription to Litmus for all of their marketing and transactional emails as I was able to show that sending test emails out of SilverPop was highly inefficient and not comprehensive. Win-win!

twitter: @lex2000

Using a test account to show the benefits of the inbox tester helped with colleagues to get a full account. Great use of labels and the checked selector for the quiz!

@danielwroberts

Twitter: @Ala_Hamilton

Proposing it once, and then finding the right opportunity. You can have all of your facts and options in order to propose it to upper management, so do it, but at that point they may or may not agree to it. Hold onto that information and wait for your opportunity when upper management starts to notice this as a best practice/pain point for themselves. You will already be ready to share the knowledge with them, they are just now more prepared to hear it.

Twitter: @JudyBame

We realized that using Alteryx would cut down immensely on the time it takes to process data and get clear answers. The cost-benefit analysis spoke for itself.

When Litmus discontinued page testing, I had to get buy-in to add an additional tool to my toolbox for something I was already doing with Litmus (BrowserStack). Creating a sense of expectation and showing that these tools are not just nice to have, but an expected requirement of doing business made receiving buy-in very easy. In this situtation, it was also easy to justify the additional cost by outlining additional features/benefits of the new tool. A visual representation of my new replacement product and walk-through of both how I will use the tool, and how everyone else on my team will interact with the tool after I've done my part made any hesitations disappear!

• Twitter: @mrbovs

@joycemyu
For the first few years we tracked all our analytics and analyzed the data to show how effective our email marketing strategies were compared to other methods of marketing. From there we look at the data to tell the story and that story helped us get buy-in.

I wanted to truly automate my welcome stream and have all the emails come from the owner of the account and not a generic email address. To get buy in, I re-wrote all the emails and made them more personalized and less marketing and laid them out in sequence. When I showed to my boss and explained how we would measure success and all I had to do was flip a switch he was on board.

@bjdoraz

When I was trying to get our Creative team on board with moving to responsive design, I hosted an email design afternoon where I had them bring in their favourite emails from other brands. I got them talking about what they liked and didn't like about them, shared the stats on how our best and worst emails performed over the past year, presented a mini responsive design 101 session, and showed them what some other brands were doing with responsive emails. By the end, they were super keen to give it a try and wanted to know how to get started. From here, I secured budget to get our first responsive template coded and we've been working on it ever since!

twitter handle: @eatspinrunrpt

Twitter: @swisswebmiss

I work at a creative digital agency in Portland, OR called eROI. In the past our software tool choices were not made by the employees using the tools, but senior leadership. This caused a lot of issues that could have been resolved with proper vetting instead of an attractive price tag. We have since established a Tech Team CoE that now vets all software choices in the agency. The team comprises of developers, performance analysts, operations, and IT. Its informed the QA tools we use, our Email Service Providers we partner with as well as internal project management tools.

As far as our overall strategy in our marketing efforts, we like to mix performance with art. While our decisions are weighted in data, we take opportunities to push the envelope with the understanding that it can be a learning experience.

Love you guys! #emailgeeks 4 lyfe <3 Heidi O.

I've created mini presentations on tools, the important thing was to focus on business benefits so that it's clear to see the value.

@samsexton

For me, obtaining buy-in is pretty easy. I think first and for most, I've got a very good track record for not recommending tools or services that we don't end up utilizing. When I do find a service or tool that I think would benefit the agency and our work, I make sure to clearly state how it will add to our current workflow or finished product. I couple that with actual data of how much more efficiently we can create something or the value it brings to the quality of the finished project. When you can show that the tool or approach can save time, money or reduce errors, then it's a no brainer.

Twitter handle: @sethsherman

Working at a nonprofit, we have really limited budget. I rarely take calls with vendors because I know we likely won't have budget for any add-ons. So if there's something I want and think we really need, I'll watch a demo, and make a case for how it will benefit us and save us time. If it's something we want to roll out to a larger audience (like our many other business units), I usually pilot it with a few of them, get their feedback, and then plan a larger rollout if we decide it's the best option.

~Kristin
@emailsnarketing

We are working on bringing up our emails to the next level with better design and analytics.

ideas4umarketing

Twitter: @sur_ge

We were trying to get video onto our email platform for a while now. Few years back very few companies were doing videos on emails with very limited success. Now we have a contract with a company that provides email video solution for us and the engagement has skyrocketed (video is only supported on a few email clients for now but hey, when it works is glorious! )

A couple of years ago our ESP developed a new personalization language that seems promising but the LOE to learn it and transfer that knowledge was big; after months of POCs I was able to show that a lot of ideas that had in the past could be achieved using the tools within this new language. It took time to learn it "the right way", develop those ideas and train the entire team but now that everything it's in place we have safe 35%-40% of development time, specially when there's complex logic involved. Another benefit it's that we have won new clients that required complex algorithms that in the past would have been impossible to satisfy.

@gerssonarce

When I started working for my current employer as a Customer Solutions Specialist email was very important, but email design was not necessarily a priority. I quickly realized our customers needed better support in this area, and along with a few other co-workers, I learned everything I could about email design. We were careful to track every customer interaction we had that involved email design support so we had data to support our claim. This lead us to be able to create an official specialized team within our support team, as well as begin an in-house custom email template service. I'm now an Email Designer for our Design team, but I still train and oversee the Template Design Team. They help our customers bring their email marketing to the next level every day, and help me advocate for everyone at our company to be stoked about email design. @r_kimberlyc

I've found that the buy-in process in my case hinges mostly on the fact that email is constantly evolving. We manage a set of 15-20 career portals and in the past, we sacrificed design consistency from email to site in our templates to produce something that is functional across email providers. With many of the advancements made in the email industry, we can now make a case for a different mobile and desktop experience and aligning that design and functionality to be closer to the brand then ever. This has helped in multiple cases but driven up mobile CTR significantly as our career network consists of 70% mobile traffic.

Best,

Kyle
Twitter: @kyleagardner

This year I've started building my on general snippet library, with copy-able snippets for all the components we use to build emails (bit of background, we use Dreamweaver and need to be able to train up new designers/developers quickly). I sat with the Design team lead, and the main email managers, explained what I wanted to do, and got the go-ahead within a week or 2 - 8wks later and we're currently live testing it within the team!

Twitter: @dragonsize