Harvard Business Review cut their email review & approval time in half with Litmus
Cara Vaccaro, Email Marketing Manager at Harvard Business Review, saw an opportunity to leverage Litmus for collaboration and email testing and cut the team’s workflow time in half!
About Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review is a management publication whose mission is to move leaders forward in their companies and careers. They offer a wealth of knowledge through their magazine, books, and a variety of digital resources available on HBR.org. Cara Vaccaro, an Email Marketing Manager, works with the editorial team to craft emails that reach subscribers across their customer journey, delivering value at all key moments.
The Challenge
Harvard Business Review’s newsletter and subscriber benefit emails are essential to their ability to be viewed as a trusted resource by their subscribers and build long-standing, successful relationships with them. The four-person team that works on these important lifecycle emails has a lot on their plates; sending multiple campaigns a week to more than 500,000 subscribers.
They need to ensure every email lives up to their brand standards and reaches every subscriber optimized, error-free, and just as they intended. They know email rendering issues can lead to lost subscribers so thorough testing and stakeholder review is a must. But with more than 300,000 ways each email can display and up to five internal stakeholders needing to review and provide feedback on every campaign, they needed a more efficient and effective process.
How Litmus Solved the Challenge
Having utilized Litmus at a previous company, Cara saw an opportunity to add significant efficiency gains to her team’s email workflow by incorporating Litmus to help them test and collaborate their way to email success.
They transformed what was a lengthy, time-consuming review and approval process into streamlined, collaborative communication with Litmus Proof. Now they have one, centralized location for everyone to leave feedback while taking into account the perspective of other reviewers.
They run every email they send through a Litmus Previews & QA test before it goes out the door. Previews & QA helped them find and fix significant email rendering issues before their sends. While their primary goal was to find and fix any email display issues across popular email clients and devices, they discovered the value of the robust accessibility checks within each Litmus test. This has helped them easily embrace email accessibility and make it a focus for all future sends.
“Litmus helped us catch several significant email display issues that, had they reached our subscribers, would have resulted in poor experiences that put us at risk of losing subscribers. It’s also helped us embrace email accessibility completely, ensuring that we’re creating the strongest relationships with all subscribers throughout their customer journey.”
The Results
With Litmus, Cara and her team have reduced the time it takes them to review and approve emails by 50%. What’s more, they now enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing their emails are fully accessible, ensuring their emails are positioned to build strong relationships and value with every single subscriber. They are excited to continue to craft industry-leading, effective emails—and complete customer journeys—with Litmus by their side.
“Litmus is an essential part of our email workflow. It has helped review and approve emails 50% faster and embrace email accessibility completely, ensuring every subscriber has the best experience with our brand, always.”
Cara Vaccaro,
Email Marketing Manager at Harvard Business Review