Essence of Email Weekly - New Litmus features to reduce email development time by 75%

Litmus recently revealed its platform's new capabilities. The new features include a visual editor in Litmus Builder, email analytics enhancements, easy sharing of complex and multi-email campaigns, and advanced usage reporting. According to Litmus's latest press release, these new updates enable marketers to cut email development and collaboration time by 75 percent. The features allow non-coders to successfully deal with email development, while the enhanced email analytics can help improve future campaigns.

"It takes 53 percent of brands two weeks or longer to produce a single email because of complicated and lengthy collaboration and review processes," said Erik Nierenberg, CEO of Litmus. "We realize it can be frustrating when not all marketing team members can interact directly and collaboratively within a martech platform. By eliminating roadblocks within the pre-send and post-send processes, Litmus empowers collaboration across an organization in one centralized place. These platform updates, including the new Visual Editor, make email creation easy for all— even marketers with no coding experience — helping them build better emails, faster and create meaningful one-to-one experiences with their subscribers and customers."

The updated platform impacts the entire email marketing cycle, allowing marketing teams to put email first. Litmus is planning to launch the features fully starting from July 29, 2020. According to the company, "the new capabilities give everyone from CMOs, VPs, and directors to email marketers, strategists, copywriters, designers, and developers the tools they need to improve email productivity and efficiency."

At Essence of Email, we are looking forward to checking out the features and their usability. In the meantime, here are a few details:

• Visual Editor: Marketers no longer need coding skills to create high-performing emails. There's no complicated setup, no formal training needed, and it's compatible with existing templates.
• Litmus Email Analytics: This makes it easier to gather insights and enables marketers to improve future campaigns.
• Advanced folder sharing capabilities: Email stakeholders can easily collaborate on multi-email campaigns – all in one place.

Looking back: This announcement follows the announcements of Litmus' integration with the SAP® Marketing Cloud, inclusion within Inc.'s list of Best Workplaces for 2020 and, Litmus Live 2020.



SURVEY


Consumers crave more from brands when it comes to email marketing



A new report from SurveyMonkey and SparkPost found that only 18% of consumers say they are incentivized to click "buy" in emails. But 50% of brand marketers report that email is "very important" in driving conversions.

The survey analyzed data from 1,124 consumer research responses and measured it against SparkPost's data (collected from 1.5 million consumer recipients' email activity). The survey results highlight consumer preferences as they compare to their actual behavior. It reveals missed retail marketing opportunities and highlights recommendations for tactics to boost engagement, customer satisfaction, and stronger brand-and-customer relationships.

The analyzed data shows the overall need for brands to take regular stock of their communications and measure customer reaction. It also shows the importance of creating campaigns that are in line with consumer needs and expectations. The following three trends also emerged:

Content is important but context rules: It's clear that consumers may not always know what they want, but they usually know what they don't want. Brands need to pay attention to the latter, as consumers are now only interested in receiving highly relevant and timely content. A spray-and-pray approach to email is detrimental to both the brand and the customer.

Retailers may be missing the boat for post-purchase opportunities: Retailers need to prioritize both customer acquisition and post-purchase engagement. Surveys, product/service reviews, product tips/tricks, and recommendations for next purchases are among the most crucial content types for keeping consumers engaged long-term.

Consumers report that email may influence their purchases, but doesn't drive them. However, research shows that's far from the truth: The data suggests that consumers use email communications as a research tool more than as a purchasing channel, but retailers report the opposite – according to a January 2020 Transactional Email Benchmark Report by SparkPost. It seems that consumers are buying directly through email more often than they think.

For more information on this survey and its results, visit SparkPost's blog post.

Additionally, triggered by the insights from this survey, CMSwire conducted a small debate. The aim was to hear marketers' opinions and stance on selling through email and their most effective strategies for email marketing.

We love what this marketer had to say:

"A good email marketing campaign is all about building a relationship between your company and the subscriber," Morgan said. Consumers buy from companies they trust, and effective campaigns build trust with every email. "Even if you convert well by email," added Morgan, "you should split test a campaign that doesn't try to sell as quickly in the follow-on, and instead works on relationship building first." That way, brands can confirm that their email marketing isn't sacrificing bigger sales for some quick wins.

Ok, and this one – because we love automating:

"The big advantage of selling through email is that you can automate the entire process, from start to finish," stated Morgan Taylor, CMO of LetMeBank. That means it's a completely hands-off sales channel that eliminates the possibility of human error. "Any hands-off sales process that can be automated is going to end up bringing in more sales," Morgan said, "even if the conversion ratio is lower, purely because you can concentrate entirely on building the funnel that feeds the system."

Pro tip: Though we wouldn't recommend fully automating your email channel, people still love the human touch.

You can check out the other opinions on CMSwire website.

Also, if this section made you think about taking your business' email marketing to a whole new level, check out Essence of Email's website & reach out to us for more info.



ECOMMERCE


Western Europe to see $10.83 billion more in eCommerce sales than expected



Before we dive in… According to a recent article from eMarketer, retail eCommerce in Western Europe was already growing at a healthy rate. But eMarketer now expects that the pandemic will cause overall spending to rise much faster than anticipated. Even as overall retail declines by 9.9% in Western Europe, eCommerce sales are expected to soar by 16.9% this year. This is a significant jump from the pre-COVID-19 forecast of 8.8%.

This boost will deflate in 2021 as brick-and-mortar stores reopen and recover some of the market share. However, the boom in online spending will place eCommerce permanently ahead of its previous position. eMarketer now forecasts that the region will see higher sales figures than it otherwise would have through 2023.

Within individual markets, countries that were already experiencing the fastest growth for eCommerce will keep that status – they'll continue to grow even faster. Good examples show, Spain will increase its sales by 22.9%, the highest rate in Western Europe and one of the fastest rates globally. Meanwhile, the Netherlands will grow at 21.9% and Italy will rise by 20.5%. These countries were hard-hit by the virus and started at a lower position than some of their European neighbors, allowing for speedier growth.

More mature eCommerce markets, like the UK and the Nordic countries, will also accelerate this year – but to a lesser extent (increasing by 14.7% and 16.2%, respectively). Overall, every country in Western Europe will increase its retail eCommerce by at least 12%.

Source: eMarketer



EMAIL DESIGN INSPO


It's summertime!



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We all love summer. Spending more time with family, soaking up the sun, and barbecuing every other weekend – it's the most beloved season of all. As it happens, summer is also the perfect time to send email newsletter campaigns with hot deals.

Follow Designmodo's guide to summer email campaigns, and peek inside their collection of newsletter examples for advice on how to drive more traffic to your website and maximize revenue during the season.

Happy emailing and stay safe!




EMAIL NEWS. AS IT HAPPENS.