Email marketing and design used to be a dark art riddled with secrets, mystery, and confusion. Now it feels more like a tight-knit family. Between conferences, social media, meetups, the Litmus community, and other events, the industry is coming together more often to share and learn from one another. When one of us succeeds in pushing the limits of email—like using HTML5 video in email—or finally convinces Gmail to think about supporting responsive design, it’s a win for all of us.

Litmus has a proud history of supporting innovation, creativity, and education in email. The Litmus community, Builder, and The Email Design Conference are just a few examples of how we’re pushing the industry forward. These initiatives shine a bright light on the hard work designers and marketers put in every day to make email happen at their organizations—and has helped these thought leaders gain visibility for their efforts.

These efforts were recognized by the industry when Justine Jordan, Marketing Director here at Litmus, was presented the eec Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year award. Alongside other passionate email lovers, like fellow nominees Ryan Phelan, Jay Jhun, and Chad White, Justine is a constant advocate for advancing the work of the email community.

This great news gave us the perfect opportunity to acknowledge all the thought leaders in the industry—because without them we wouldn’t have the community, the conference, or the tools that help us push email forward every day. This list of email geeks are the people who passionately (and happily!) spend their days planning, writing, coding (and debugging… and debugging), testing, and executing emails. Because of them, email is finally being recognized as a results-driven craft—a craft that certainly isn’t dead.

Update: In our first version of this post, we named 67 thought leaders. In recognition of the collaborative nature of email (and our accidental omission of some key contributors in the industry), we encourage the community to add to this list! Submit your favorite thought leaders in the comments.

Note: While many wear several email-related hats, we’ve tried to break them into groups for easier viewing!

CREATIVE & STRATEGY

These experts often combine humor, insight, and observations about user experience and subscriber behavior in their tweets. View them all in our creative strategists Twitter list!

Alessandra Souers
Senior Brand Manager, JibJab

Alex Williams
VP, Creative Director at Trendline Interactive

Andrew King
Senior Strategy Consultant at Lyris

Andrew Kordek
Co-Founder & Chief Strategist at Trendline Interactive

Bob Frady
VP of Technology at Zeeto Media

Brent Walter
Marketing Automation Strategist at DEG

Colin Nederkoorn
Founder & CEO at Customer.io

Cori Hemmah
Senior Manager, Demand Generation at Xamarin

Darryl Vos
Director of Art & Technology at G+A Advertising

Jason Meeker
Strategic Partner at RootedELM

Jay Jhun
VP of Strategic Services at BrightWave

Jordan Cohen
CMO at Fluent, Inc.

Jordie van Rijn
Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Consultant at eMailMonday

Justine Jordan
Director of Marketing at Litmus

Kirsty Trainer
Digital Marketing Executive at toinfinity

Mark Reeves
Founder at Clearbold, LLC

Megan Merrifield
Marketing Coordinator, Strategic Marketing at Gulfstream Aerospace

Ryan Phelan
VP, Global Strategic Services at Axciom

Skip Fidura
Global Client Services Director at dotMailer

Tamara Gielen
eCRM & Lifecycle Email Marketing Expert at Plan to Engage

Tink Taylor
Founder & COO at dotMailer

Vicky Ge
Marketing Manager, Trade Books at Amazon

Check out their tweets →

EMAIL HACKERS & DEVELOPERS

The leaders here are HTML and CSS wizards—making the impossible possible when it comes to email. See all their updates in the email hackers & developers Twitter list!

Alex Ilhan
Email Developer at display block

Anna Yeaman
Creative Director at STYLECampaign

Becs Rivett
Freelance Email Marketer at Becs Rivett

Brian Graves
UI Team Lead at DEG

Clinton Wilmott
Freelance Email Marketing Specialist

Dan Denney
Front End Developer at Code School

Elliot Ross
Founder at Action Rocket

Fabio Carneiro
Lead Email Developer & UX Designer at MailChimp

Jacques Corby-Tuech
Contractor at Curse, Inc.

Jaina Mistry
Email Specialist at Padawan Group

Jason Rodriguez
Community Manager at Litmus

Justin Khoo
Email Wonk at FreshInbox

Kevin Mandeville
Content Designer at Litmus

Kristian Robinson
Email Developer at iris worldwide

Mark Robbins
Email Developer at RebelMail

Mike Ragan
Designer at Action Rocket

Nicole Merlin
Email Engineer at Campaign Monitor

Paul Airy
Email Designer & Developer at Beyond the Envelope

Stig Morten Myre
Email Developer at Campaign Monitor

Ted Goas
Designer & Developer at Canfield Scientific

Check out their tweets →

TESTING & ANALYTICS

These are the folks developing innovative testing plans and mining through piles of open, click, conversion, and site data to prove that our designs are driving performance. View their tweets and subscribe to their updates in the testing & analytics Twitter list.

Dela Quist
CEO at Alchemy Worx

John Foreman
Chief Data Scientist at MailChimp

Kath Pay
Marketing Director, cloud.IQ

Kristina Huffman
Global Practice Lead, Creative Services at Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Matt Byrd
Email Marketing Manager at Uber

Mike Heimowitz
Online Marketing Manager at Atlassian

Tim Watson
Founder at Zettasphere

Check out their tweets →

CONTENT & RESEARCH

Content is king, and so are these experts who contribute research, thought leadership, and plenty of advice about copy, graphics and all the other good stuff that makes up the body of our messages. See all their updates in the content & research Twitter list!

Bill McCloskey
Founder at Only Influencers

Chad White
Lead Research Analyst at Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Dan Oshinsky
Newsletter Editor & Staff Writer at BuzzFeed

David Daniels
CEO at The Relevancy Group

Jeanne Jennings
Email Consultant at Jeanne Jennings

Kristin Bond
Freelance Email Nerd

Loren McDonald
VP, Industry Relations at Silverpop

Mark Brownlow
Publisher at Email Marketing Reports

Ros Hodgekiss
Community Manager at Campaign Monitor

Scott Cohen
VP of Marketing at Inbox Group

Simms Jenkins
CEO at BrightWave

Zachary Hanz
Email Marketing Manager at Sprout Social

Check out their tweets →

DELIVERABILITY, SECURITY & PRIVACY

If the emails we create never made it to the inbox, we’d be in big trouble. These are the folks that influence the inner workings behind getting email delivered. View their tweets and subscribe to their updates in the delivery Twitter list.

Al Iverson
Product Manager at Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Andrew Bonar
Founder at emailexpert

Andy Thorpe
Professional Service Consultant at Pure360

Craig Spiezle
Executive Director & President at Online Trust Alliance

Dennis Dayman
Chief Privacy & Security Officer at Return Path

Joey Rutledge
Delivery Engineer at MailChimp

Laura Atkins
Founder at Word to the Wise

Matthew Vernhout
Founder at EmailKarma.net

Steve Henderson
Compliance Officer at Communicator

Check out their tweets →