Become a better email marketer with real-world advice, best practices & practical takeaways

Advanced Responsive Email and Layouts | SOLD OUT

If you know your way around basic HTML emails, simple media queries, and common email rendering quirks, but are confused by how to tackle the rendering challenges that come with advanced layout and responsive design concepts, this workshop is for you.

We'll review the state of responsive email and cover advanced layout and structural techniques. You'll learn the pros and cons to each approach from development and testing time to maintainability as well as the hacks at your disposal to tackle each technique.

The following layout and structure techniques will be covered:

• Hybrid/spongy technique
• Display table method
• Three table-cell technique
• Drop calc method
• Fab four technique
• Mobile-first adaptive method

You'll walk away with a mastery of advanced layout methods along with the knowledge of how to decide which layout techniques works best for you

This is a hands-on workshop where you'll be live coding. Be prepared to bring a laptop and get your hands dirty with hacks!

Troubleshooting Email Like a Pro | SOLD OUT

Learn how to squash nearly any email bug in this hands-on workshop. Discover why email rendering is such a pain and dive into the most common pitfalls in modern email design. Together, we’ll discuss why email clients do what they do and fixes for almost every problem you’ll encounter in email design today. We’ll also take time to look at your own campaigns and work through solutions to improve your next send. Each attendee will be eligible to submit a campaign for inclusion.

What we’ll cover:

• How email clients render campaigns
• Common bugs in popular email clients
• Solutions for challenging rendering problems
• Troubleshooting techniques
• Plus, personalized troubleshooting of your submitted emails

Leave with a strong understanding of how different email clients affect your emails, the bugs they introduce, and techniques for combatting any problems you may encounter when designing and developing HTML email campaigns.

This workshop is perfect for beginner to intermediate email designers and marketers looking to build and send more reliable and effective email campaigns.

This is a hands-on workshop. Be prepared to bring a laptop and get your hands dirty!

Targeted Emails & Lifecycle Messaging Strategies | SOLD OUT

One-size-fits-all broadcast emails are becoming gradually less effective. Subscribers expect more. They expect brands to routinely fulfill at least one facet of the paradigm of “delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.”

In this workshop, you’ll:

• Learn about different methods for creating targeted email messages
• Understand the subscriber lifecycle
• Find out about the latest trends in automated emails
• Audit your triggered email program and identify new emails to add
• Uncover opportunities to “review and improve” emails you thought were “set it and forget it”
• See dozens of real-world examples to inspire your own emails

This workshop is perfect for beginner to intermediate email marketers, as well as designers and coders looking to broaden their understanding of personalization and triggered messaging.

Breakfast

Email Testing Strategies: Radical Redesign vs. Iterative Testing

Iterative testing provides a solid foundation for making data-driven decisions. However, iterative testing in email development can be challenging if your goals are to quickly respond to customer feedback and maximize the effect of your business communications. It can be more effective to combine small and frequent iterations with radical overhauls to maximize the impact of your A/B testing. Sometimes you have to cannonball into the deep end rather than dip your toes in the water.

Two years ago, I found myself in charge of one of my company's biggest traffic-drivers: an email that is sent over 1 billion times a month. Right away, I hated the way the email looked, and I had reasons to doubt its effectiveness. In this session, I will tell the story of how I convinced my stakeholders to drop the small changes and try a radical redesign, resulting in an 11% increase in CTR.

Anyone attending this talk will walk away with an alternate approach to testing for data-driven results. They'll also learn how to empower a big company to adapt new approaches as email development continues its fast pace evolution.

Data-Driven Design: Intelligently Applying Best Practices

There are so many email design best practices in our world right now, it can be difficult to discern which are the right ones to apply to your own work—some of the advice even seems to contradict itself! In this talk, we'll walk through the design and development of an email, showing at each step (imagery, typography, content layout, code structure) how we can practically encourage a culture of data collaboration between designers, developers and marketers to make the best design choices for your brand.

From {{me.name}} to {{you.name}}: Experimenting with Personalization

From product recommendations to tone and design, marketing personalization is a powerful mechanism for connecting customers with our brands. Today's automation software and tomorrow's machine learning move marketers beyond "your name here" tactics into interpreting customer behavior and anticipating needs. This session presents personalization experiments that made meaningful differences for customers and looks ahead at machine learning developments in marketing. Some tactics might be familiar, while others are new-but we hope all will inspire you to think outside the bracket.

Solving Outlook 120 DPI Scaling Issues with Hybrid Emails

We've all been there. You have a beautiful email design, solid code that brings it to life, and then… dreams are shattered when you preview the email in Outlook 120 DPI. The content looks misaligned, out of proportion, zoomed in, squished. You may have a large Outlook audience that you can't ignore, maybe a boss who would see this if the email goes out, or you just like your emails to look amazing across as many environments as possible (or a combo of these three!). What are you to do?! In this talk Courtney will cover the techniques needed to get your emails displaying beautifully in Outlook 120 DPI.

Break

Building the Engagement Platform: A Step On Our Journey to Delight the Customer

How data-driven is your organization? Hear about the platform we built at Atlassian to overtly encourage the use of best-practice growth methodologies, ensuring we get as close as possible to the holy grail of marketing ("Right Time, Right Person, Right Message"). In this session, attendees will learn:

• How to make an effective trade-off between build vs. buy in your email marketing stack
• How to put data at the forefront of every decision you make regarding who to target and how to determine whether a message is successful
• A new framework which can be used to more effectively test email design and content independently of each other

Streamline Your Email Development Workflow with Gulp

Are you still coding all your emails one by one while inlining every single CSS style? Ever wonder how you can leverage web technologies to help you output your emails more effectively? What about supporting the growing number of countries your business is targeting? Oh, and what about not having to write redundant code? Enter Gulp. Get a unique perspective on how Nest have been able to streamline our email development workflow. Get some insight on how its helped us support a growing business as it expands into new international markets. We'll talk about how this task runner has increased our velocity, brought clarity to our code structure, improved our QA workflow, inspired innovation, and made for some happy stakeholders all while eliminating repetitive code.

Live Optimization Session

Submit your emails for review, soliciting tips from the audience and our speakers. You'll get plenty of A/B testing suggestions, quick wins, optimization tips, and other advice to take back to the office. It promises to be fun, fast-paced and full of insight!

Lunch

Choose Your Own Adventure with Dynamic Email Marketing

Does your company have multiple product lines vying for the same email audience? Are competing messages creating a non-cohesive story and experience? Learn how Salesforce developed a new approach to its email marketing program and designed a win-win solution for internal clients: a dynamic and always-on email system to ensure the right message was reaching the right person at the right time. Consisting of three engines working in tandem, the Dynamic Email Program assigns each contact a persona, selects the best offers for them, and optimizes the content library based on user engagement. Learn how you can take real steps toward developing a dynamic email program for your company.

Design Yourself Out of Job: Get Your Marketers to Code Emails

Some of us are all too familiar with statements like "All you have to do is...", "You just have to...", and the very worst... "It's easy!" How do you build empathy, knock down walls between teams, and lower the technical barrier so that anybody in your organization can "just" build an email—while also maintaining a consistent look and feel for your email campaigns? An email style guide, that's how! These magical style guides are shared and dynamic documents that enable people from every corner of your company (even that one guy) to code up clean and battle‐tested emails that are on brand and ready for your audience's inboxes.

Using Automation to Personalize the Customer Experience

We all know automation is important, but how do you get started? This session will talk about how we used scaled automations at Prezi to drive increased product usage and renewal rates. You should walk away with ideas on how to start applying automation to multiple aspects of your email marketing efforts, as well as ideas on recycling content and how to measure.

Design & Develop ADA Compliant Email

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance is now as important of a design consideration as the visuals and copy in your emails. While there's no specific or legal standard to follow, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) can help you reach the highest compliance ratings. But where do you start? Armed with lessons learned from our recent compliance update, we'll show you how to create rock solid WCAG 2.0 AA compliant emails everyone can enjoy.

Join us to explore how the WCAG influences:

• General design, layout & typography
• Coding (HTML, CSS, hacks)
• The technical bits outside HTML/CSS: working with APIs, dev teams, etc.

Speaker Speed Dating + Networking Break

Improve your campaigns and get 1:1 time with speakers and other experts.

Email Marketing Emergencies: A Survival Guide

$hit happens. Whether your email is written to "NAME," your link doesn't link to where it's supposed to, or you accidentally sent an email to the wrong list, surviving an email marketing emergency is all about keeping your cool and knowing what to do next. This session will be your practical guide to creating your own email emergency response plan.

Localization at Scale

For many organizations, sending emails in multiple languages is a must. For email developers, doing so in a way that minimizes additional production time is crucial. During this session, we'll tackle the technical challenges that come with localization, with specific focus on scalability and automation. We'll discuss streamlining the translation workflow, utilizing Google Scripts to eliminate the mundane task of reformatting translations, and (most importantly) building infrastructure that supports any number of languages in every campaign you build.

Breaking the Table: A Future-Forward Approach to Email

“Emails must be 600px wide.”
“Emails must look the same across all email clients.”
“Code like it's 1999.”

The email industry has been plagued with long-standing myths and #AlternativeEmailFacts that quite simply aren't true anymore. This session will dive into breaking down these falsehoods to change your perception of email design and strategy. It will even question what many believe are fundamental requirements in email: should we still use inline CSS or table structures? Prepare yourself to have everything you know about email be questioned and shaken to its core. Get a unique approach on email design for the future and open yourself up to a brand new perspective of possibilities--instead of limitations.

Wrap-up + Farewell