10 Litmus Power-User Tips to Make You a Better Email Marketer

From building emails in Litmus Builder to running Spam Tests on your latest email campaigns, it’s easy to hit the ground running when you open a Litmus account.

To help you get the most out of all of Litmus’ features, we’ve compiled a list of power-user tips to help optimize your email workflow, improve subscriber segmentation, and help you work smarter—in essence, become a better email marketer.

1. Improve Subscriber Segmentation

Email marketers rely on data to be able to deliver the right emails, at the right time, to the right subscribers. At Litmus, we’ve made collecting important subscriber data easy with Email Analytics. Easily measure engagement levels, which email clients and devices your subscribers use, and where in the world they’re opening your email. But what can you do with the data after you’ve collected it?

Fill in the gaps of your subscriber data by combining Email Analytics reporting with your email service provider’s metrics. When you export individual-level data from Email Analytics, you’ll be able to see exactly who your most-engaged subscribers are, the email client and device they’re using, which city they open your email in, and more.

Use this enhanced analysis to improve your subscriber segmentation. At Litmus, for example, we use our own Email Analytics data to geo-target our emails promoting Litmus Live, ensuring we promote the relevant event city to the right people.

2. Quickly Recapture Email Previews

On occasion, you may need to manually re-load an email preview in either Checklist or Builder. Rather than reloading all the previews, simply hit “R” on your keyboard when you’re viewing the email preview you want to recapture. Magic.

3. Easily Run Spam Tests Via Your ESP

Running a Spam Test through your ESP is the most accurate way to identify issues that could keep you from the inbox (rather than copying and pasting in your HTML code into Litmus). However, some ESPs have issues with sending a test email to a large number of individual email addresses.

If you have this issue, split up the list of test email addresses required for a Spam Test into two or three chunks. Send to each of these chunks within five minutes of each other to ensure your Spam Test appears in your account.

Make it to the inbox, not the spam folder Identify issues that might keep you from the inbox and get actionable help for how to fix them with Litmus Spam Testing. Try Litmus free →

4. Ensure Your Email Design is Accessible to Color-Blind Subscribers

Creating accessible emails should be a goal for all email marketers. After all, a more accessible email means it can be viewed by a larger audience.

A common challenge in accessibility is creating designs suitable for people who suffer from color blindness. Color blindness is the decreased ability to see color or differences in color, and approximately 4.5% of the entire population is affected by it.

Color Contrast Checker is an easy-to-use tool to check the contrast levels between the text and background color of your email design. Litmus’ Email Previews also has a color blind simulator preview, where you can see what your email design as a whole may look like to a subscriber with color blindness.

To test your email’s rendering for color blindness, go to “Choose email clients” in Checklist or Builder and select “Color Blindness”.

5. Compare Campaigns’ Engagement Levels

Comparing and analyzing how different email campaigns perform is one step towards optimizing the overall performance of your campaigns. By learning which campaigns are generating higher levels of engagement from your subscribers, you’ll be able to craft emails that are more relevant to them.

Email Analytics gives you the ability to compare campaigns and get a visual representation of the data you’re comparing.

The charts come in handy if you need to quickly present to stakeholders, clients, or your boss how different campaigns have performed. If you like to dig into the numbers behind the data, there’s also the option to export the comparison data as a CSV file.

6. Never Forget to Run a Checklist

Litmus Checklist is designed to help you reduce errors, improve production processes, and decrease turnaround time—but only if you remember to run a Checklist with every send!

Ensure you never forget to run a Checklist by adding your unique Checklist email address to the test list you use to send email tests from your ESP.

7. Understand Your Gmail Audience

Using Email Analytics, you can identify how large your Gmail POP/IMAP account audience is. That’s because Email Analytics’ data is collected at an individual level.

To do this:

• Export your campaign data to a CSV file.
• Select all opens from a Gmail client, and identify the number of non @gmail.com email addresses used to open the campaign.

This will give you an idea of the total number and percentage of POP/IMAP users you may have for your audience, and if this is a user base you want to support moving forward. Emails in Gmail render differently depending on if the user is using Gmail with an @gmail address versus a POP/IMAP account. Learn everything you need to know about Gmail rendering in our webinar recording.

8. Personalize Your Checklist for Your Team

We understand that every organization and team has their own checklist to ensure every aspect of the email is correct before send. Which is why we built Custom Checklists, available on Litmus Enterprise accounts.

A Custom Checklist gives you, your team, and/or your clients the ability to add custom rules, lists, approvals, and production notes to each Litmus Checklist you run. You can even see when and who completed each item, giving you total clarity on every step of your email workflow.

9. See How Email Clients Render Code

Litmus’ Email Previews shows how different email clients render your email. But did you know you can also see how an email client is rendering your email code?

To help debug issues in your email code, right-click on an Email Preview and open the image generated in a new browser tab or window. Change the “.png” file extension to “.html” to see how the email client renders your code.

With this useful feature, you can easily see why your email may not be rendering as you expected in certain email clients by pinpointing if certain CSS attributes or HTML elements aren’t supported in the email client.

NOTE: This is an experimental feature which is not fully supported and may not work every time.

10. Easily Organize Your Data for the Team

Improve your email workflow by reducing the time spent searching for the right Email Analytics report or Spam Test. Use tags in Checklist, Email Analytics, and Spam Testing to organize your Litmus reports.

For example, attach the tag “halloween” to all your Halloween-themed promotional campaigns and spend less time searching for them in your reports listing. You can use any tag you want to identify your campaigns. We recommend choosing a tag naming convention and applying that across Checklist, Email Analytics, and Spam Testing.

Share your Litmus power-user tips in the comments below—we’d love to hear how you use Litmus!

Want more resources like this?

Subscribe to Litmus Weekly to get your weekly dose of email inspiration, tips, and tricks, right in your inbox.