Delivering Episode 27: T-Minus 6 Days

In this episode of Delivering, host Jason Rodriguez gives a quick overview of what to expect during Litmus Live Week—an entire week of sessions, Live Optimization, and networking opportunities for everyone in the email marketing industry.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Delivering, a podcast about email design, strategy, copywriting, development, and the email marketing industry. I’m your host, Jason Rodriguez.

Delivering is brought to you by Litmus—the only platform trusted by professionals to help you send email with confidence, every time. Over 600,000 marketing professionals use Litmus’ tools to build, test, and analyze better email campaigns faster.

Head over to Litmus.com to start your free 7-day trial of Litmus, and start sending better emails today. Be sure to subscribe to Delivering on iTunes or Spotify to listen to future episodes and join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #DeliveringPodcast.

I’m going to keep today’s episode short. I know you’re busy and all of us here at Litmus are, too. Primarily getting ready for next week, which is our first ever Litmus Live Week.

If you haven’t been following along, Litmus Live Week is our replacement for what would normally be our in-person conferences. Instead of holding them in London, Boston, and San Francisco this year, we’re bringing the magic (or as much as we possibly can) of our yearly conferences to your screen, so that everyone can learn from the leading minds in email marketing while staying safe.

With that in mind, I wanted to use today’s episode of Delivering to give you a better idea of what to expect from Litmus Live Week.

First things first. Litmus Live Week is completely free. All you have to do is head over to litmus.com/conference and register to attend. You’ll get access to everything happening next week and some handy emails about what to expect each day.

And it is “each day” next week. Litmus Live Week is a full work week—five days—of content. Starting on Monday, September 14th, you’ll get a mix of live and on-demand sessions on damned near every topic email marketers, designers, and developers need to know about in 2020. We’ve been working with some amazing people in the industry to pull together sessions on everything from design and development to strategy, copywriting, collaboration and team work, and more.

There’s an absurd amount of learning coming your way.

On Monday, our own CMO—Melissa Sergeant—will kick things off before a keynote from everyone’s favorite marketing writer, Ann Handley. She’ll be walking through 7 lessons she’s learned during the pandemic to get people to actually read an email newsletter in between binging Netflix and worrying about the dismal state of the world.

There are a bunch more sessions on Monday, but the two I’m really excited about are the talk from my own colleague and friend—Whitney, who you’ve probably seen on the Litmus blog or recent webinars—about grammar in email and writing for your audience, not necessarily a bunch of stuffy rules, as well as Capital One’s Anitra Fenderson’s talk about how to think about email strategy, testing, and communication when you’re working in an enterprise setting.

On Tuesday, I’ll be taking notes from Leslie LeCroy and Kathryn Colohan from Ansira about how to design emails for equity and inclusion, a topic that’s more important than ever in a world facing racial and social injustice at a scale that’s hard to fathom. I’ll also be tuning into Samar Owais’s talk about abandoned cart strategies. I know it’s a topic that’s more important than ever as so much of our spending moves online due to COVID-19, so I can’t wait to see what she says about building a more valuable, customer-focused abandoned cart strategy.

On Wednesday, I’ll actually be chatting with Joe Teplow from Salesforce about interactivity in email. What works, what doesn’t, and how to figure out if interactive emails are right for your company. I’m also really excited for Litmus Live alum Nick Goldsberry’s talk about using source control and continuous deployment to maintain brand standards and provide a little brand protection. It’s something we’ve been tackling with Design Library and Visual Editor in Litmus Builder, but a topic which can—and should—be looked at from a lot of different angles.

Thursday includes what I imagine will be one of the more contentious talks of Litmus Live Week. Mike Nelson from Really Good Emails will be digging into whether or not email pop-ups, one of the most hated features of any website, actually work. I’m expecting it to replace the years-old GIF vs. JIF debate and would love to hear attendees’ takes on the subject, so be sure to log in and watch at 10am Eastern Time.

Finally, on Friday the 18th, we’ll hear from people like Nikki Elbaz from Copyhackers about why and how to take risks in your email copy. I’m also really looking forward to Emily Schickli’s talk on building an email production system when you’re a team of one. It’s another topic I think deserves a lot of attention, especially as teams are tightening their belts in a shaky economy. We’re all expected to do more with less, so Emily’s talk is sure to help more than a few folks out.

Those are just a few of the dozens of talks during Litmus Live Week. Again, it’s a mix of live sessions that require you to sign on at a specific time and on-demand sessions that can be accessed whenever you have the free time.

Beyond the sessions, we’re still bringing attendee favorites like Live Optimization online, too. I’ll be hosting Live Optimization sessions with a bunch of friends on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. While Tuesday and Wednesday are general Live Optimization sessions, Monday will be focusing on newsletters in particular with Annemarie Dooling from The Wall Street Journal. And on Thursday, I’ll be joined by Alice Li from Squarespace (where she just started today. Congrats, Alice!) and Logan Baird from Campaign Monitor. We’ll look at a few interactive emails and pick apart what works and what can be improved.

Live Optimization submissions are still open. You can submit any campaign you’re working on or sent in the past and potentially get it shown on-screen with a whole bunch of expert feedback from me, our panelists, and the Litmus Live attendees. Just go to https://bit.ly/3bDUAVI and send in your campaign along with some quick notes on your goals, role in its creation, and what kind of feedback you’re looking to receive. Try to share a live version of your email so we can grab the code. Something like the campaign’s ‘view in browser’ link is perfect.

We’re also bringing things like attendee networking and Ask An Expert online, too. We’ve set up a dedicated Slack group where attendees can meet and learn from each other, Litmus staff, and some of our partners. Again, it’s free to join and a great place to connect with people you already know and make some new email friends, too.

Finally, we’ll be hosting our inaugural Email First Awards on Friday at 2pm Eastern. Our events manager, Lauren Kremer, will be crowning the winners in multiple categories as well as congratulating the first class of Litmus-Certified Marketers and Designers.

There’s still a ton to get ready for next week so, again, I’m keeping today’s episode short. I hope you’ll join us next week for 5 days of online email geekery with some of the smartest people in the industry. Just head over to litmus.com/conference for details and register, for free. We’ll see you Monday, September 14th at 11am Eastern Time.

As always, if you want to learn more about Litmus and how our suite of tools helps over 600,000 email marketers send better campaigns faster, head over to Litmus.com. And be sure to subscribe to Delivering on iTunes or Spotify to listen to future episodes and join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #DeliveringPodcast.

Until next week, cheers.