Switching ESPs: What You Should Expect

What to Expect When Switching ESPs

More than 28% of brands dropped or switched email service providers during 2017, according to a Litmus poll. And more than 16% of brands told Litmus that changing ESPs was a top email marketing priority for 2018.

If you’re thinking of switching ESPs, first, be sure to create a solid ESP request for proposal (RFP). Second, go into the process fully understanding what’s involved.

To help you with that second part, Litmus reached out to email experts at Marketing Democracy, BrightWave Marketing, DEG, Trendline Interactive, emailvendorselection.com, Laughlin Constable, and Red Pill Email to get their advice.

>> Read the entire post on the Litmus blog

The Last Word on August 2018

The Last WordA roundup of email marketing articles, posts, and tweets you might have missed last month…

Must-read articles, posts & reports

Mossberg: The Disappearing Computer (Recode)

Email Workers Bogged Down With Operational Tasks: Study (MediaPost)

Give Your Email Team the Keys to the Marketing Database (Neverbounce)

The Importance of Email File Size (SparkPost)

2018 Cart Abandonment Inspiration: We have abandonment issues (Curated Email)

The 6 Pillars of Effective Email Acquisition (Trendline Interactive)

Insightful & entertaining tweets

Noteworthy subject lines

ASPCA, 8/3 – Wildfire Update: 300+ Animals Assisted
Tiny Prints, 8/19 – Here’s a sneak peek at our 2018 Holiday Collection
The North Face, 8/19 – Labor Day Starts Now
Nike, 8/3 – Back-to-school essentials
FansEdge, 8/4 – Four Weeks Till College Kickoff…Got The Feels?
Hayneedle, 8/8 – Game on: Up to 35% off homegating gear starts now …
Morton’s, 8/3 – Dine with us during Boston Restaurant Week!
Olive Garden, 8/9 – You get together. We’ll handle the rest.
REI, 8/9 – Spend a Relaxing Night in the Woods with Us
Jetsetter, 8/12 — #UpAllNight: Cities That Never Sleep
Victoria’s Secret, 8/8 – Because AC.
Pier 1 Imports, 8/18 – Hey summer, don’t let our pumpkins hit you on the way out.
REI, 8/19 – REI & Brooks are Giving Back to Scenic Trails
The North Face, 8/2 – Recycled tees that give back…
Ann Taylor, 8/12 – LAST CHANCE: $10 Off A Rotating Wardrobe
ModCloth, 8/19 – Exponential outfit options right this way.
Staples, 8/19 — $10 off is like lunch money in your pocket.
Sony, 8/4 – Meet Your New Assistant | Sony Smart TV with Google Assistant
White House Black Market, 8/26 – Start The Week Off With Confidence
Banana Republic, 8/28 – Working overtime (the clothes, not you).
Horchow, 8/26 – What’s new: Hooker Furniture
Barneys New York, 8/18 – The Top Jewelry Trend for Fall
J.Jill, 8/30 – The Fall Five—essential styles you need now.
Williams Sonoma, 8/12 – 10 Things You Didn’t Know Your KitchenAid Could Do
Jetsetter, 8/19 – Live the “Crazy Rich Asians” Lifestyle at These 7 Real-Life Film Locations
Clinique, 8/30 – Play now for a Superheroes Makeup Kit.

New posts on EmailMarketingRules.com

ESP RFPs: Improving Your Vendor Selection Process

Email Brand Guidelines: Why You Need Them and What to Put in Them

The Most Inspiring Email Marketing Programs: 30+ Must-Subscribe Brands

The Good News and the Bad News about Email Marketing’s ROI

Really Good Emails Podcast: Email Benchmarks

EEC: The Email Marketing Industry Needs to Think of Itself in Broader Terms

Hard Learned Lessons from Giving 100+ Talks and Webinars

KoMarketing: Email Content Planning is Critical Step for Campaigns

The Last Word on July 2018

Why a Lack of Email Marketing Mistakes Is a Red Flag

As a culture, we’ve been trained to instinctively see every mistake and every failure as bad. But smart marketers know the truth: Only frequent mistakes and only big failures are bad.

Infrequent and small errors are opportunities to learn and improve, and are pretty much inevitable—particularly, if you’re doing anything innovative. This is especially true in the world of email marketing, where frequency is high, turnaround times are short, resourcing is lean, and complexity is growing with no end in sight.

However, despite the outsized opportunity for email marketing mistakes, more than 50% of brands haven’t sent an apology email for an email error in the past 12 months, according to Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey.

Our research shows that if you’re in that group, there’s a decent chance that you should be concerned rather than proud. Yes, email marketing mistakes aren’t great, but not making any could be a sign of much bigger structural problems within your email marketing program and within your company.

In this 5-page Leadership Brief, you will learn…

  • How the strength of an email program’s quality assurance process affects the likelihood of making an apology-worthy mistake
  • How company culture can impact the remediation of email marketing errors and the customer experience
  • About the relationship between email program innovation and email mistakes

>> Download the free Leadership Brief

Doing an ESP RFP: Improving Your Vendor Selection Process

Nearly 5% of brands are very dissatisfied with their email service provider, and another 23% are dissatisfied, according to a Litmus poll. Many of those brands might consider switching ESPs in the months ahead.

However, before any brand switches ESPs, they will likely write a request for proposal. A RFP is a list of questions you send to prospective vendors, whose answers you then compare to one another to differentiate their offerings and find the best fit for your brand’s needs.

But which ESP candidates should you include? How should ESP RFPs go in terms of process? What should you include in your RFP?

To answer those questions and more, Litmus reached out to email experts at Marketing Democracy, BrightWave Marketing, DEG, Trendline Interactive, emailvendorselection.com, Laughlin Constable, and Red Pill Email.

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog

Why You Need Brand Guidelines and What to Put in Them

Brand style guides tend to meticulously detail permissible fonts, header sizes, image style, logo sizes and placements, and on and on. However, despite the clearly unique considerations of the email channel, many companies don’t have any email-specific guidance in their brand guidelines.

Nearly 38% of brands don’t have email brand guidelines, according to Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey, which is based on a survey of 3,000 marketers worldwide.

Thankfully, more brands are seeing the need to add email-specific content to their style guides, with 18% more brands creating email brand guidelines since 2016. That’s with good reason.

Having email brand guidelines makes designing emails easier and faster, particularly in organizations with distributed email programs or that use email agencies or freelancers. Marketers who describe their email programs as successful are 27% more likely that those at less successful programs to have brand guidelines for email (68% vs. 53%).

For all the details on what to include in your email brand guidelines…

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog

30+ Must-Subscribe Brands: The Most Inspiring Email Marketing Programs

The first step in designing a great email of your own is often seeing a great email from another brand. In a word, the first step is inspiration.

While some marketers get their email inspiration from Pinterest boards, Dribbble, and other websites, the most common way is simply by signing up to get email from great brands.

Want to know which brands you should consider subscribing to? In our 2018 State of Email Survey, we asked marketers which brands they thought had the most inspiring email marketing programs. Here are the top 30 brands, based on more than 3,500 brand suggestions from nearly 1,400 marketers.

Consider these must-subscribe brands…

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog

The ROI for Email Marketing: The Good News and the Bad News

Email marketing’s return on investment is 38:1 on average, according to a Litmus survey of 372 marketers worldwide. That’s both good news and bad news… [Tweet this]

The good news is…

That’s a ringing endorsement of email’s acceptance among consumers, its targeting and personalization capabilities, and its business utility. By most measures, the ROI for email marketing is roughly twice that of other digital channels—if not better—and blows away the returns seen with traditional media channels like TV, radio, and direct mail.

The bad news is…

This high ROI misleads marketers and gives them false comfort. Here’s why…

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog

Really Good Emails Podcast: Email Benchmarks

Really Good Emails Podcast - Episode 2In Episode 2 of the new Really Good Emails Podcast, Matt Helbig and Mike Nelson dig into the results of their 2018 Email Industry Conditions study, which is based on survey responses from more than a thousand people in the industry. They talk about some of the most interesting stats—including team sizes, jobs, and email inspiration sources—and reminisce about their first jobs in email marketing (no shame, gentlemen, no shame).

Then I join the podcast to talk about Litmus 2018 State of Email Survey Research Series, how some of our results differ from Really Good Emails’ survey, and interesting findings around email production times and email review processes.

>> Listen to the podcast

Email Experience CouncilEmail marketing has changed profoundly over the last 10 years, but I don’t know that the email marketing industry has fully recognized the impact. We still talk a lot about “email service providers” and “email marketers,” which may be limiting our audience and limiting our ability to educate and rally the industry.

That’s because many companies that enable brands to send email may not think of themselves as email service providers. And many people who send marketing emails may not think of themselves as email marketers. I know for sure that many marketers define an ESP much more broadly than we as an industry tend to.

The results of Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey really drove this reality home for me…

>> Read the full post on the Email Experience Council’s blog

Presentation Tips: Lessons Learned from Giving 100+ Talks and Webinars

At Litmus, we pride ourselves on having lots of first-time speakers at our Litmus Live conferences in Boston, San Francisco, and London. To help put these very talented—but often very nervous—email marketing experts at ease, we do everything we can to provide them with the information they need to make their sessions successful. Along the way, we introduce speakers to each other, give them plenty of opportunities to get feedback from Litmus staff, and even run one-on-one calls where speakers can pick our brains, throw around ideas, and even present a complete dry run of their talk.

The advice we offer our Litmus Live speakers is based on producing more than a dozen Litmus Live conferences, as well as our personal experiences. Between Justine Jordan, Jason Rodriquez, and me, we’ve given well over a hundred presentations and webinars. There have been high points and there have been low points along the way.

A recent personal low point reminded me that I still have improvements to make, and spurred me to reach out to Justine and Jason so the three of us could share some of those lessons learned.

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog