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

Ensuring you deliver an experience optimized for mobile subscribers is incredibly important. Studies have shown that responsive email design results in a 15% increase in unique clicks for mobile users and 80% of subscribers delete an email if it doesn’t look good on their mobile device.

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
• Three table-cell technique
• Fab four technique
• Display table method
• Table-less method

We’ll build a simple email with common layout patterns using the techniques listed above. You'll walk away with a mastery of advanced layout methods along with the knowledge of how to decide which layout techniques work best for you and when to use them.

This workshop is for you if...

• You have solid knowledge of HTML and CSS and at least a basic understanding of media queries.
• You’re having trouble getting your emails to be responsive across all email clients and apps, especially quirky ones like Gmail App IMAP that don’t support media queries.
• You are having a hard time wrapping your head around advanced layout structures and techniques for responsive email—or aren’t sure where to begin.
• You’re looking to improve your layout structure for better maintainability, faster development, and quicker scale amongst your entire team.

Requirements:

• This is a hands-on workshop where you'll be live coding an email template in all of the various layout approaches. Be prepared to bring a laptop and get your hands dirty with code!
• Prerequisite knowledge and comfort with fundamental HTML and CSS. This workshop isn’t designed for beginners, but for intermediate to advanced attendees who are seeking to level-up their layout structure.

About your workshop host:
Kevin Mandeville is a Product Manager and resident email design expert at Litmus. Coming from a web design background, Kevin is an email design convert and loves hacking HTML emails into doing things people don’t expect them to do. He has pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in HTML email by incorporating .HTML5 video background, hidden golden ticket searches, and award-winning live Twitter feeds. He is also the co-host of The Email Design Podcast.

Your workflow is an expression of the investment you make in every email—and is a predictor of email program success. Yet only half of brands consistently use a content calendar and 46% never create an email brief, even for important or complex emails. Creating a high-performing email requires time, the right resources, and a solid email workflow—whether you’re a team of one or many.

Use this workshop to benchmark your workflow against Litmus research, best practices, and insights from industry experts and understand the components that make up a great email workflow. Register your team for this unique opportunity to participate in interactive roundtable discussions that will reveal:

• Critical steps in the process of crafting an email from planning and conception through deployment—and onto analysis
• Tools, tactics, and advice for creating an optimal email workflow
• Strategies for improving collaboration between roles and departments
• How the right workflow can improve visibility into email strategy, performance, deliverability, and more

This workshop is perfect for individuals and teams who are ready to take a critical look at their email workflow, identify pain points, and repair inefficiencies. While we will touch on some email development aspects of the email workflow, technical knowledge is not a prior requirement.

About your workshop host:
Jaina Mistry is an email marketing specialist with nearly 10 years experience in development, design, and strategy.

Is your strategic email marketing plan actually giving you a strategic advantage? If you’re not focused on the right tactics and growth strategies, it’s probably not.

Based on Litmus surveys of thousands of email marketers, we’ve identified the email activities that generate the highest competitive advantage.

In this workshop, you’ll:

• Learn about Golden Email Opportunities that offer high value-to-risk ratios
• Explore opportunities among niche, developing, and mainstream tactics and tools
• Get detailed actionable advice on how to get the most out of each of those opportunities
• Develop an individualized plan to improve your brand’s email program

This workshop is perfect for email marketers, managers, directors, and chief marketing officers who are looking to develop a stronger strategic plan for their email program.

About your workshop host:
Chad S. White is the author of “Email Marketing Rules” and more than 3,000 posts and articles about email marketing trends and best practices. Prior to Litmus, he served as lead email marketing researcher at three of the largest email service providers—Salesforce, ExactTarget, and Responsys. He is the Email Experience Council’s 2018 Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year.

As email marketers, we recognize the power of email to meet customer needs, while driving revenue and brand goals. What we lack is the ability to stay top-of-mind for these same customers throughout their digital journey through social media, online events, paid search, and more. We’ve validated our industry, but phase two is here: omnichannel marketing as the status quo. While it may be intimidating at first, fitting email into omnichannel marketing programs is achievable for any organization, regardless of market.

At ProQuest, Lauren Kremer helps researchers around the world connect with resources to enhance learning and insights. She uses her years of email and digital marketing experience to make customers true partners in the journey. When not designing, deploying, and analyzing emails, Lauren contributes to Women of Email and enjoys helping others empower their expertise in our industry. She also loves spending time with her family, re-watching The West Wing or Parks and Recreation, crafting, and keeping up-to-date on current events, with healthy doses of cupcakes thrown in for good measure.

In the age of customer journeys, hyper-targeted emails, and automated testing, how do you redefine email and set yourself apart? One way is to create a full-fledged email product that enhances the product experience, acts as the backbone of your email program, and drives better engagement. See how Grammarly did just that with their flagship email product, Grammarly Insights.

Drew Price got his start in the retail space running point on the promo program for The Home Depot at a top direct-response agency in Atlanta. He then spent 6 years building new programs for IGN Entertainment and Grammarly. His focus is on delivering customer-focused creative and pushing the email channel to its limits.

Want quicker insights and improvements for your email marketing program? By implementing a framework for experimentation, you can make better assumptions, build and test hypotheses, and get real results based on customer behavior faster than ever before. See how Intuit learned to fall in love with the problem (not the solution), got scrappy, and implemented a robust framework for email experimentation that drove better results across a diverse set of customers.

Rian and Kate are part of the Buy Experience team at Intuit, the makers of TurboTax and QuickBooks. The team is responsible for transactional emails sent to customers around the world. Rian holds degrees in Scientific & Technical Communication and Human-Computer Interaction. She works from her home in beautiful Flagstaff, Arizona, where she lives with her husband, two kids, two dogs, three chickens, and a hedgehog. Kate is an experienced Technical Writer, certified Project Management Professional (PMP), and Innovation Catalyst at Intuit. She works from her home in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where she lives with her husband, two kids, and two Soft-Coated Wheaten puppies.

Automation provides amazing opportunities, for companies large and small. Get an inside look at Pinterest’s journey from human-curated emails to dynamic campaigns based on automated recommendation algorithms. Along the way, learn about which parts of an email marketing program can actually be automated, how to create a content and design system that scales, and some pitfalls to avoid from a company that’s seen more than their fair share.

Seth Weisfeld is the product lead for Growth Traffic at Pinterest. Seth's teams focus on user engagement and revisitation utilizing email, push notifications, SEO, and paid advertising. Seth studied computer engineering at the University of Texas, Austin and co-founded ADRevolution, a pioneer in email marketing and customer conversion.

Getting teams on the same page can be tricky. Explaining what’s possible within your email program to different audiences poses some distinct challenges. With an email playbook, you can quickly guide the conversation and strategy around existing and new campaigns, easing the friction typically involved in planning, designing, and developing emails. Learn what an email playbook is, how to develop your own, and how to put it to work in your own organization.

Shannon is a Senior Email Developer at T. Rowe Price. Outside of coding and launching emails, she can be found blogging about tech and leveling up her front-end development skills in the areas of Git, JavaScript, and WordPress.

The Email industry is in a constant state of flux, with new tools, trends, and challenges shaping email marketers' priorities. Learn about the five trends rippling through the industry and see how Litmus research—and the Litmus Email Creative Platform—can help you understand and tackle some of email's biggest challenges.

The holiday season is upon us, and email marketers are more hectic than ever—trying to balance priorities, planning, and execution with higher volumes of email. Things don’t have to be overwhelming, though. With proper forecasting, strategy, and teamwork, you can not only manage your busy season, but thrive during it. See how The Bouqs Company tackled their busy with better planning and cross-team communication, testing their way to better retention and revenue in the process.

Phil currently is the Director of CRM at the Bouqs Company, which is an online flower retailer that delivers flowers fresh from eco-friendly, sustainable farms to doorsteps nationwide. Phil overseas all outbound marketing efforts to current prospects and customers dring creative, segmentation, and lifecycle marketing strategies across email, mobile, social and offline channels. Prior to the Bouqs Co., Phil has spent six years in CRM and online marketing roles in the healthcare and fitness industries managing various direct to consumer programs focused on driving growth with existing customers.

Email designers are constantly overworked—trying to get campaigns out on time, on budget, and with minimal problems. Email design systems can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to create an email, while maintaining quality standards. See what goes into building out a successful, scalable email design system—from code and tooling to strategy and adoption—and learn about how design systems can improve your workflows all while creating better experiences for your subscribers.

Crystal Ledesma is an email designer and developer with four years of professional experience. She currently creates and manages modular email design systems for a wide variety of Zillow Group's B2B customer verticals and lends support to Zillow Group's other customer email segments. Building personal websites and templates as a hobby led her to the email world, where she savors the distinctive code and unique challenges email provides (yes, even Outlook).

Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of email marketers like the possibility of switching email service providers—and for good reason. Switching ESPs is a massive undertaking, fraught with challenges and potential problems. See how Lucidchart moved 12 million records and hundreds of email flows in an absurdly short amount of time and get tips for facing your own ESP migration, whether it needs to happen in months or a matter of weeks.

Micaela Wright manages a growth marketing team at Lucidchart, the popular diagramming application. With a database of over 11 million, her team works primarily on conversion rate optimization - including areas like trial communication & onboarding, transactional emails, reactivation flows, and batch sends.

When a project calls for a custom feature that stretches beyond what an ESP can handle, email marketers are confronted with a difficult choice: Pay additional money or use an API. For many, APIs are monstrous beasts that leave them feeling intimidated and forcing them to spend big money in the process. But APIs don’t have to be scary. In fact, APIs can transform your campaigns from static and predictable into dynamic, unexpected, and valuable. Walk through a customer journey and see how APIs can be put to work to enhance the subscriber experience, with plenty of tips on API basics, tools, and usage to get over the fear of using APIs.

Heidi Olsen has navigated the treacherous world of email marketing for the past 9 years. Her goal is to hold email to the same standards as web development. A bonafide #emailgeek, you may find her browsing Twitter, blogs, and Slack channels in search of finding the next email frontier. Heidi was previously a Senior Developer at eROI, pushing the email marketing envelope for brands such as Taco Bell and Aramark. She is currently a Senior Front End Engineer at Bumped, a fintech startup.

Machine learning is a hot topic that’s promised to revolutionize nearly every industry. But what does it mean for email marketers? See how the team at Credit Karma partnered with their data scientists to create models for better subscriber targeting and engagement. With a combination of data models, machine learning, and human intuition, they’ve gained insights into their subscribers that have led to higher engagement and conversion rates, and a better user experience for all of their subscribers.

Stats nerd turned project manager turned marketer, Emily is a Senior Growth Manager at Credit Karma. Driven to combine data with empathy, Emily is thrilled to be part of a team that is helping a member base of over 80 million Americans take control of their financial futures. She also has a real soft spot for puppies.

Quality assurance is a vital part of the email development process but often falls through the cracks in favor of getting emails out the door. Yet, defining a QA process and following that process on every send can lead to greater customer satisfaction and better email marketing results. Learn how to define a clear QA process and implement that process in your own email program, with tips on reviewing both the creative and technical sides of an email, along with the tools you need to ship more reliable and effective emails to your subscribers.

Nathan Stack is the director of quality assurance for RAPP Los Angeles. He has worked on email marketing campaigns for high-profile clients such as Toyota, McDonald's, Bank of America, AARP, and Kraft. Prior to joining RAPP ten years ago, he was a newspaper copy editor and designer.

It’s hard to be a marketer in a heavily-regulated industry. Finding that middleground between too cautious and too risky can be tricky, almost as tricky as navigating the typical compliance and legal waters. By defining a better process, communicating more effectively with compliance officers, and using some well-tested copywriting tips and tricks, you can set yourself up for success in even the most heavily-regulated industries.

Sarah Esterman believes that when it comes to marketing, serving the customer serves the business. She currently leads digital marketing at a fintech startup called Bumped. Not her first foray into the complicated world of heavily-regulated industries, Sarah was previously at Simple, where she built their lifecycle program from scratch. A writer by nature, Sarah's superpower is translating the complex into the digestible, relatable, and delightful. She's popular with animals, and her favorite non-human entities are her 7 lb Persian cat named Jazzy, 18 houseplants, and a (bowling ball of a) dog named Parker.

We all know that personalization can drive email marketing results. But how can we move beyond simple personalization and build more targeted email campaigns through content and design? See how more innovative segmentation, coupled with a modular design system and the proper tooling and processes, can help you create more dynamic, personalized emails that subscribers devour.

Jeffrey is an email developer at Inkceptional, a boutique design firm in Madison, WI. For more than a decade, he has helped brands build campaigns that resonate with recipients. He specializes in using software, automation, and an inconceivable quantity of soda to solve the unique challenges of modern email development.

Email onboarding is hard. Understanding who your audience is and what they want is only the first step. By applying some strategy and adopting an experimental mindset, you can test new concepts to see what provides the most value for new subscribers. Using this information, you can set better goals, measure your successes, and—more importantly—push the boundaries of what’s possible in email onboarding for more successful programs.

Chris Kaundart is currently the Email Marketing Manager for the Trello product at Atlassian. He got his start in marketing at a small electronics company (DPS Telecom) in his hometown of Fresno, CA. Chris also spent over 3 years at the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly ExactTarget), working with retail clients to implement new email initiatives.

Interactive email was voted the biggest email marketing trend two years in a row. But how important is it really? In this panel discussion moderated by Jason Rodriguez from Litmus, leading email experts will weigh in on the interactivity debate, answering some of the biggest questions surrounding the topic: Should we be using interactive emails? How do you even track performance? And will Google’s AMP for Email initiative completely change the field?

Far too often, we focus on the metrics associated with an email send without looking at how that campaign affects every other part of the marketing funnel. But, by testing out different strategies at the top of the funnel, email marketers can positively impact downstream funnel metrics. Get an inside look at how Indeed used top-of-funnel experiments to drive core downstream metrics, including insights into what to test, how to track it, and how to apply their concepts to your own campaigns.

Lindsay is a Product Manager at Indeed. Her team sends billions of job alert emails every month to job seekers around the world. Indeed is the world's #1 job site, with over 200 million unique visitors every month from over 60 different countries. Lindsay leverages data across the job search process in order to make decisions to help people get jobs.

Most ESPs have some sort of scripting language, but email designers are often left wondering how to put them to work. See how a dynamic content matrix can help you identify where to leverage email scripting in your own campaigns, and get tips on implementing scripting languages to create more dynamic, engaging email campaigns that not only delight subscribers, but drive ROI in the process.

Nick Goldsberry is a Solutions Architect at Lev where he chases code highs and helps clients get the most from Marketing Cloud's technology. Originally from Nebraska, Nick found his way to Indiana via Iowa State and is an ExactTarget and Salesforce Marketing Cloud alumnus, having served in multiple production and community roles. Nick is an ISTP and can often be found running, contributing to the Email Codebase, playing TF2, or helping his son learn Judo.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s no silver bullet for engaging with audiences. The hype over Facebook has slowed down, Twitter has plateaued, and we’re now realizing that we need to keep a conversation going across platforms. It’s time to consider strategies and designs outside of the inbox that make people excited to read when our name finally does arrive in their priority folder. Learn about strategies to seamlessly flow from one platform to another, stay top-of-mind even outside of the inbox, and increase the value of emails in the process.

Annemarie manages engagement and audience development at Vox Media, including an email program of 50+ daily newsletters and alerts across all Vox Media properties. Having spent the last decade focusing on reader loyalty, she also led community and retention efforts at The Huffington Post and Salon, among others, and is deeply invested on how newsrooms can grow trust with their readership.