The Best of the 2017 State of Email Survey Research Series

THE BEST OF THE
2017 State of Email Survey
Research Series

Litmus surveyed more than 3,500
marketers about all aspects of their email
marketing programs, including how they
produce and design their emails, attract
subscribers, and maintain deliverability.
@ChadSWhite @LitmusApp

We published the results in:

In this presentation, we share the most
interesting and actionable insights from
those three reports, including...

1.The best ways to improve your email
production process
2.The subscriber acquisition sources that
most endanger your deliverability
3.The best ways to make your email
creative more effective

What are the most impactful changes you
can make to your email workflow to improve
quality and accelerate performance?
Let’s talk about 3 ways…

Email Briefs: A description
of the goal, audience, etc.
of the email you’re making

24.5%
Successful programs
11.0%
Less successful programs

Your email brief should answer...
Who should get this message?
What action should subscribers take?
Why will they take that action?
When should they receive the message?
Where are they likely to read the message?

How will you measure this email’s success?
Is this email part of a series of messages or
a subscriber or customer journey?
Do you have supplemental material that’s
important to answering the other questions?

For an in-depth look at email
briefs, check out How to Define the
Goal of Your Next Email Marketing
Campaign and download the Email
Planning Workbook discussed.

Pre-send Checklists:
A quality assurance list for
your emails

28.1%
Successful programs
12.1%
Less successful programs

What should your checklist include?
❏Envelope content
❏Preheader text
❏Rendering
❏Images (including retina optimization)
❏ALT text (including styling)

❏Links (including https)
❏Link tracking
❏Other tracking embeds
❏Dynamic content
❏Plain-text version
❏Legal compliance

For an in-depth look at what to
include in your pre-send checklist,
check out The Ultimate Email
Checklist: 24 Things to Check
Before You Send.

Intervention Visibility:
Your ability to see and
respond to email mistakes

Why do successful programs make more
apology-worthy mistakes?

Why do successful programs make more
apology-worthy mistakes?
● They send more emails.
● They send more complex emails.
● They have better visibility into
performance, which alerts them to errors.

For an in-depth look at how to
improve your visibility into mistakes
and avoid them, check out the
State of Email Marketing Mistakes.

❏Create email briefs
for all emails.
❏Use an extensive
pre-send checklist.
❏Get better visibility
into errors.
RECAP
Email
Workflows

The bad news is that being blacklisted and,
in particular, being blocked, are fairly
common.

Poor deliverability costs brands money. It
results in direct costs from remediating
blocks and blacklistings and—usually
larger—indirect costs from not being able to
reach all of your active subscribers and
customers.

The good news: Marketers who describe
their email programs as successful are only
19% less likely to have had their emails
blocked in the past 12 months (31.6% vs.
38.8%). And successful programs are just as
likely as other programs to be blacklisted.

Even though deliverability problems don’t
stop email programs from being successful,
that doesn’t mean that marketers shouldn’t
do more to avoid blocks and blacklistings.

Deliverability problems are not a cost of
doing business.

These situations are avoidable, as certain
practices clearly lower email marketers’ risks,
while others absolutely raise them—
sometimes dramatically.

But the most impactful findings were around
subscriber acquisition sources. We looked
at those used by brands that suffered recent
deliverability problems and those that hadn’t.

Let’s talk about the 3 most problematic
subscriber acquisition sources and why
they’re so dangerous:
1.List rental
2.Co-registration
3.List purchase

If you rent a list from a company, you
should supply the company with the
message that you want sent. The list owner
then sends that message on your behalf to
their list—which you never see—using their
usual name and email address, not yours.

The unsubscribe link included in this email is
an opt-out for the list owner only, not you.
The list owner typically includes a tag in the
subject line and a message at the top of the
email indicating that the message is from one
of their partners.

This arrangement helps ensure that your
message will be well received by the
recipients, because the list owner would
suffer unsubscribes and spam complaints if
they sent a message from a partner that
wasn’t a good fit for their list.

We polled more than 300 marketers and
found evidence of lots of confusion around
how a list rental should be done. Some list
rentals were essentially list purchases.

def. co-registration: When a brand allows
visitors to their website, users of their app,
etc. to sign up to receive emails from third-
parties, often while or after signing up for
email from the brand

Anytime someone is signing up to get your
emails on a property that you don’t control,
signup quality declines significantly. Co-
registration leads to confusion and regret.

What are the risks of buying a list?
● Violation of ESP’s terms of service
● Hard bounces
● Spam complaints
● Spam traps
● Low engagement
● Negative word of mouth

For an in-depth look at the issues
with these subscriber acquisition
sources, check out The 5 Most
Problematic Subscriber Acquisition
Sources: Are they redeemable?

❏Only work with
vendors who do list
rental the right way
❏Use co-registration
only with sister
brands
❏Don’t buy lists!
RECAP
Email
Deliverability

How can you improve your email creative so
that it’s more engaging and more effective?
Let’s discuss about 3 ways to do that...

Responsive Design:
Emails optimized for
desktops and mobile

A strong majority of brands use responsive
design for their emails, although adoption is
lower for automated and transactional emails
than for broadcast and segmented emails.

Most brands are using responsive design to
create minor changes between the desktop
and mobile versions of their emails.

For an in-depth look at
responsive email design, check
out Understanding Responsive
and Hybrid Email Design.

Animated GIFs:
Image file that displays
multiple images over time

Motion is powerful because it draws the eye.
It’s attention-grabbing. Support for video in
email is decent, but support for CSS
animation is stronger and support for
animated GIFs is nearly universal.

Successful email programs are 52% more
likely than less successful programs to use
animation at least sometimes in their email
designs (53% vs. 35%).

Animated GIF usage is much stronger
among B2C brands. Our 2017 State of Email
Creative research shows 38% of B2B
brands never use animated GIFs in their
emails, compared to 22% of B2C brands.

That’s unfortunate because B2B brands have
great opportunities to use animation to
demonstrate products and concepts,
particularly software companies.

Tips for using animation:
● Make the first frame meaningful in case
animation is blocked
● Keep loaded weight (code + images) to
1MB. Definitely no more than 2MB.
● Minimize number of GIFs per email

use animation effectively, check
out our Guide to Animated GIFs in
Email.

A/B Testing:
Determining which of two
versions performs better

Analytics allow marketers to listen to their
subscribers and collect feedback. A/B testing
allows marketers to listen to their subscribers
in a much more targeted way and iterate on
feedback much more quickly.

Brands are much more likely to A/B test their
broadcast and segmented promotional
emails than they are their automated and
transactional emails. However, successful
email programs are more likely to test their
automated and transactional emails.

39% of email programs generate 25% or
more of their email marketing revenue from
automated and transactional emails; 13%
generate 50% or more. That trend makes
A/B testing these emails even more critical.

Most email A/B testing is focused on high-
yield elements like subject lines and calls-
to-action. However, there are many
opportunities further down the value chain.

When doing email A/B testing:
1. Focus your email A/B testing efforts on
campaign elements that are most likely to
move the needle on performance, such as
subject lines, calls-to-action, hero images,
and headlines and subheads.

2. Understand whether your testing will get
you closer to a local or global maximum.
Janie Clarke of Indeed recommends A/B
testing small, medium, and large changes to
find both your local and global maximums.

#LitmusLive @LitmusApp @ChadSWhite @KevinMandeville

3. Have a clear hypothesis.
4. Choose a testing victory metric that is
aligned with your campaign goal.

5. Use test segments of active subscribers.
6. Test similar groups of subscribers.
7. Ensure your testing groups are big enough
to produce statistically significant results.
Consider abtestguide.com/calc/

8. Use holdout groups, when appropriate.
9. Create test plan and record test results.
10. Confirm results of tests.
11. Share the results of your email A/B tests
with other channel owners at your company.

use A/B testing effectively, check
out our 13 Email A/B Testing
Mistakes that Limit Your Success.

❏Mobile optimize all
your emails
❏Use animation more
often
❏A/B test your
automated and
transactional emails
RECAP
Email
Creative

For an in-depth look at all of the
results from our survey, check out
the reports, webinars, infographics,
and blog posts in our State of
Email Survey Research Series.

About the Author
Chad S. White
● Litmus’ Research Director
● 3-time Author of
Email Marketing Rules
● EEC’s 2018 Email Marketer
Thought Leader of the Year

Thank You!
You can find all of Litmus’
State of Email Survey Research at
litmus.com/stateofemail

The Best of the 2017 State of Email Survey Research Series

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