Litmus Email Analytics Help you See Engagement

I had the opportunity to speak with Justine Jordan of Litmus at SxSW. This is a tool that lets you preview campaigns across 34 email clients and devices. I wish I had had this tool when I was running customer email newsletters and had not thought of testing with our internal email client, Lotus Notes.

The tool was developed initially to help designers with Web pages in the UK. Then, given demand, they expanded the offering to email tests, and given their roots, also landing pages in different browsers.

How it handles spam filters

Litmus covers all major spam filters at ISPs and webmail providers, as well as corporate filters.

A key component of spam testing is looking at the reputation of the machines where campaigns are run. For example, it checks if your campaign is sent from a machine that shares IP address with someone who is doing shady things.

Some of the gotchas of marketing on spam are:

• using popular marketing words
• the sending mail server is listed with dnswl.org with low trust (it occasionally sends spam)
• your message mentions millions of dollars
• you used dollar signs and exclamation marks in your content
• you used the term "absolute" in the body of your email, which Outlook considers spammy
• or you used the term "free" with exclamation marks

And so on.

Tracking and engagement

The tool runs on Amazon EC2 virtual machines and has QA baked in. It allows you to tell how many emails have been printed and forwarded from the email client directly (and not inside the email). It also tells you if the message has been read, as defined by kept open for 7 seconds, skimmed, between 2-7 seconds, or glanced at and deleted.

This allows you to see the level of engagement with the content and adjust as appropriate. The premium package gives you the opportunity to track information at the individual user level.

Litmus works with any email provider as they are ISP-agnostic.

Conversation Agent's Take:

On the enterprise side, marketers generally track analytics like open rate, clicks on articles, and so on. This tool lets them see much more on the engagement side by allowing them to identify who is reading vs. skimming vs. glancing at an email and focus their efforts more accurately with the more engaged readers.

As an agency, I can easily see how it would be useful to integrate this tool to test landing pages and emails to reduce waste and increase impact, especially due to formatting.

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Follow Litmus on Twitter, or contact them by phone and email.

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Look for more technolgogies and tools reviews from SxSW in coming weeks.

 

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Comments

[chris sietsema]

Yep. Litmus is great. I use it for all my email marketing projects. They provide a way to publish tests for each email client selected (including iPhone and iPad) so you can share it with others on your team or your client to prove that everything is ship-shape before hitting "send". Worth every penny.

[Almquist]

Litmus is a staple in our testing efforts for email and websites. Verifying on current browsers, email clients and mobile devices is critical for any QA process. Being able to review with internal teams and publish a client facing version gives peace of mind to everyone involved. Litmus is a must-have for any agency toolkit.

[Christina Pappas]

Agree completely that we are missing the point if we just look at clicks. What happens After the click? Funny, I wrote a post on our blog about something similar. Not measuring engagement with email and landing page but the actual content like whitepapers. Are they read? Where do readers spend the most time? Did they zoom? Did they share? Etc. As marketers, I believe we are inherently curious and therefore obsessed in some ways with analytics. I live for thids kind of data. Do you know if it works with Marketo?

Here is a link to our blog if your interested:
http://www.zmags.com/blog/measuring-engagement

[Valeria Maltoni]

Testing is critical when it comes to email communications. We have even more tools and interfaces today.

[Valeria Maltoni]

And reassures nobody will have egg on her face, like I did for Lotus Notes 6.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Oh, I like the idea of zooming -- thinking about how people literally touch the content on iPads and iPhones...

Thank you for the link to your post.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Oh, I like the idea of zooming. Thinking about iPhads and iPhones, it's particularly appropriate.

Thank you for the link to your post.