Lauren Smith
Lauren is a SaaS marketing leader with over a decade of experience developing, executing, and managing full-funnel integrated marketing strategies. She started off as the Marketing Coordinator at Litmus in 2012 and is now the VP of Acquisition and Lifecycle Marketing when she leads a fantastic team of email geeks.
Latest posts:
What’s New in Litmus Q3 2020: Webinar Recording + Q&A
With the latest updates in Litmus, it’s never been easier to get high-performing campaigns to market faster—with no additional resources necessary.
What’s New in Litmus for March 2020: Webinar Recording + Q&A
Interested in the latest and greatest updates to Litmus? Catch up on our latest customer webinar all about Design Library, email client recommendations, and more.
PNG, GIF, or JPEG? Which is the Best Image Format for Email?
With so many image file formats available—BMP, EPS, JPEG, PNG, and GIF to name a few—how do you determine which is right for your email? Each format produces variances in file size, compression, and quality. To make things more confusing, support for specific file types can also vary between email clients. In this post, we'll weigh the pros and cons of four popular file formats for email: JPEG, GIF, PNG, and SVG.
Maintain Full Control Over Your Email Marketing Program with Litmus Custom Controls
Discover how Custom Controls on Litmus Enterprise plans can give you full visibility into your email marketing program—and equip your team with advanced email tools so they can spend less time fixing problems and more time optimizing email performance.
How to Write & Design a Great Email Signature
We sat down with Dan Hanrahan, Founder and CEO of Sigstr, to talk about how email marketers can optimize every email—not just ones from the marketing department—through email signatures.
How to Optimize Your Email Production Workflow [Infographic]
Every brand’s email production process is unique, with different planning, development, and approval processes. With data from our 2016 State of Email Production report and insights from Movable Ink, we’ve teamed up to put together an infographic that distills the best tips and tools to optimize your workflow. From goal-setting to content creation to email development and post-send reporting, we cover the email creation process from start to finish.
How to Effectively Use Advertising in Your Email Campaigns
Industry experts from PowerInbox and LiveIntent share their best practices and use cases for incorporating ads into your email marketing campaigns.
The Ultimate Guide to Email Optimization + Troubleshooting [eBook]
A lot goes into a creating a successful email marketing campaign. In The Ultimate Guide to Email Optimization + Troubleshooting, you’ll learn how to optimize for every part of the email creation process.
How to Use Live Content to Create Contextual Email Campaigns
One way to create contextual, relevant email experiences is through live content. Justin Foster, co-founder of LiveClicker, a provider of real-time email solutions, shares his insights on the benefits of live content, its use cases, and how it adds context and relevance to campaigns in this interview.
How to Use Click-to-Call Functionality for Better Email Attribution
A customer’s interaction with a brand rarely happens in a single touch or even in just one channel. In this interview, Kyle Christensen, VP of Marketing at Invoca, shares his insights on tying click-to-call functionality into your email marketing strategy and measuring its return on investment.
How to Define the Goal of Your Next Email Marketing Campaign
Goal setting is crucial to email marketing success. Defining your goals helps guide the direction of your campaign, and makes it easier to measure the success of your efforts. Here are four questions to answer to help define your goals, and navigate the creation of your campaign.
Email List Hygiene: How to Build a Clean Email List
An engaged list comprised of active, valid email addresses plays a crucial role in deliverability. Matt McFee, CEO & Founding Partner of BriteVerify, shared insights with us on building a valid email list, as well as list hygiene tips for keeping only valid, engaged subscribers on your list. Here's what he had to say.
The Power of Video and Email: Webinar Recording
Email and video are two of the most engaging ways to interact with your audience. Put them together and that's where the real magic happens. We joined Wistia for a webinar on the power of video and email, discussing best practices for designing great video campaigns in your email, without losing functionality. Check out the slides, recording, and a Q&A.
A Tribute to Ray Tomlinson, the Inventor of Modern Email: Look How Far We’ve Come!
With the passing of Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email and the @ symbol, we’d like to thank him for creating our favorite communication medium and reflect on how it’s evolved over the past 45 years.
We Analyzed 13 Billion Opens to Discover Where Subscribers Read Email [Infographic]
In our 2015 Email Market Share infographic, we analyze over 13 billion email opens to see where subscribers read emails. We take a look at mobile, webmail, and desktop opens over the course of the year, providing insights about why these changes occurred and how they may affect your email campaigns.
Sendwithus Integrates Litmus Instant Previews Into Their Email Platform
Transactional emails are some of the most important emails a company sends. Yet, despite their value, these emails aren’t paid the same attention as commercial marketing messages and they're often riddled with errors. Sendwithus has solved the problem of testing these transactional emails—and catching these errors. Starting today, Sendwithus users can test their emails instantly using Litmus technology.
How to Design Email Landing Pages That Convert: Webinar Recording
You’ve spent time getting your email just right. Have you given your landing page the same attention? A great landing page can make the difference between a successful email marketing campaign and a wasted opportunity. In our recent webinar with Unbounce, we covered the elements of a high-converting landing page. Check out the slides and recording, as well as a Q&A with Unbounce's co-founder, Oli Gardner.
How to Recover From Broken Personalization in Email
How many times have you received an email that started with a variation of “Hey {First_Name}”? The answer is probably a lot. What should you do if you send an email that contains a personalization fail? If you choose to take action, then do it the right way. Magic Beans sent a Thanksgiving email with a personalization fail—and responded to the mistake gracefully and personally. Let’s take a look at how they successfully handled their error.
How to Turn Prospects Into Lifelong Customers: Webinar Recording
Want to turn prospects into lifelong customers? You can with email. Through cart abandonment emails, first-time customer welcome series, win-back campaigns, and more, you can trigger marketing communications for maximum impact. We joined forces with Rejoiner’s Mike Arsenault for a guest webinar on how to optimize all of these email opportunities and build a powerful customer acquisition plan. Check out the slides and recording, as well as a Q&A with Mike.
27 Tweetable Takeaways from Litmus Live 2015
The Email Design Conference brought together over 500 passionate email designers, marketers, and strategists in one space—all eager to share their knowledge and soak in all of the information possible. Seemingly countless tips and advice were shared throughout the conference—and on Twitter. While there were thousands of amazing tweets, we’ve highlighted a few of our favorite takeaways below.
6 Alternatives to Spending Thousands on an Email List
Purchasing a list of email addresses may seem like a great solution, but it’s not. While you get a list of leads instantaneously, there are some major drawbacks. It not only costs thousands of dollars, but purchasing a list can negatively affect your deliverability and sender reputation. Luckily, there are alternatives to building your lists—alternatives that are cost-effective and not detrimental to your sender reputation.
9 Tips to Optimize Your Subscriber Journey
Using email to its full advantage is all about providing your customers with best possible experience. If they’re happy with the emails they’re receiving, then you’ll reap the benefits (which hopefully includes lots of sales). From the email signup, to the email itself, to the landing page—and everything in between—optimizing for every step of the subscriber experience is key to email marketing success.
Introducing Sam, Senior Developer
We’re thrilled to introduce the newest member of the Litmus team—Sam. He’ll be joining the product team as a Senior Developer.
Introducing Nadia
We're thrilled to welcome Nadia to the team! Alongside the rest of the support team, Nadia is here to answer any questions (or listen to any feedback) you have about Litmus. Based in the UK, she’s able to offer early morning assistance to our international customers.
Rendering, CSS Support & More in Office 365’s Outlook Web App
In the past, MIcrosoft has migrated all of its Hotmail users to Outlook.com in an effort to provide a more modern email experience. In order to further align their user interface and feature set, Microsoft has another big change coming: they’re replacing the interface and infrastructure of Outlook.com with Office 365. This will not only give Outlook.com’s inbox a facelift, but will likely affect the way your emails display for those subscribers. In this post, we'll take a look at Office 365, and how it'll affect email rendering in Outlook.com.
Introducing Rahim
We’re thrilled to welcome Rahim to Litmus! He’ll be joining us as a senior developer on our product team.
Introducing Chad White, Research Director
We’re thrilled for you to meet the newest member of our team—Chad! He will be working with Justine, Jason, Kevin, and me on the research and education team here a Litmus. Chad will be spearheading new research initiatives and creating content that inspires email marketers to be more creative, empowers them to make better decisions, and helps them understand new developments in the industry.
iPhone vs. Android: How to Make Email Look Great On Mobile
With so many people using smartphones—and email being the most popular activity on those devices—it’s important to assess how your emails display on those small screens. There’s a lot to consider when it comes to mobile email design. On top of the multitude of smartphones, users have dozens of different email apps to choose from—each with their own set of rendering quirks. In this post, we take a look at differences in rendering across the numerous iOS and Android mobile email apps.
Engagement Analytics Give Curated Users Unrivaled Email Reporting
Managing subscriptions, reporting, and analytics across these two distinct platforms presents a unique challenge. Curated founder, Dave Verwer, found that utilizing standard open racking and ESP analytics wasn’t an option—they’d be missing out on crucial push notification data. Faced with the option of creating their own email tracking platform, or integrating with an existing solution, Curated decided that the Litmus Email Analytics API was their best solution.
Best Practices for Optimizing Order Confirmation Emails
Marketers and email designers typically focus the majority of their efforts on optimizing their newsletters and promotional emails. The primary goals of these communications are usually new sales, leads, and conversions. However, there is a missed opportunity in engaging and retaining users with order confirmation emails. In this post, we provide tips for optimizing receipt emails and include plenty of examples along the way.
Use Testing to Continuously Learn More About Your Audience
Through testing, you can gain insights into your subscribers and their preferences that help you send strategic, optimized, and better-performing campaigns. The team over at Emerson, a manufacturing and technology company, wanted to generate interest in their product by offering a free trial via email. While they knew their B2B audience consisted mostly of conservative, middle-aged engineers, they were unsure which type of offer would resonate best—and ultimately produce the most leads. So, they set out to test...and test...and test again!
