Instiller News

The Email Design Conference 2016

A couple of weeks ago, Instiller had the pleasure of attending the most important email design event of the year – The Email Design Conference 2016 in London and organise by Litmus.

Hosted by Litmus, we’ve been watching how the event has evolved over the past few years and thought it’d be a great time for us to attend for the first time, learn about the latest trends in email marketing and take away a few new ideas that we could incorporate into Instiller.

After signing in and grabbing some Litmus swag, we settled in for an afternoon of email marketing talks; ranging from Strategy & Design Leadership to How to Send Moral Email. The talks were packed full of info but perhaps a summary of take-aways from the Tuesday afternoon were:

  • Email personalisation and automation is important and generic follow up emails that suffer a lack of relevancy can hinder the user
  • Consistency when interacting with a brand, be it within the email template or destination website can solidify the offer
  • Conversion path in email: AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
  • Focus on performance of the email rather than size of the list
  • Measure your results – base changes from real campaign results and use them to support your own views

Following on from the talks were a series of Live Optimisation discussions, with email templates submitted by some attendees being discussed. Attending as an ESP, it was really insightful and encouraging to see marketers really pushing the boundaries of email design, whilst also gaining an understanding of how external stakeholder factors can sometimes hinder the design of the perfect template.

On the Wednesday, the sessions were split into two tracts – Marketing & Development. We focused mostly on the development sessions, as these were more relevant to the development of Instiller features and support. Again we found the day packed with useful information, but some key points:

  • Use role=”presentation” on your main table within your email template, it’s far more accessible
  • Banish the use of the term ‘Click here’ – it doesn’t translate well to mobile/tablet devices (tap!) and patronises the user
  • 70% of all carts are left without purchase, use abandoned cart emails as reminders. Automation is an ideal companion here
  • “GMX is Gmail’s little annoying sister”
  • CSS3 animations can add great visual effects to email, but don’t forget that the content is still king!
  • Background images can create impactful designs without using too many images
  • Email should be easy. It should be like lego

Heading back home from London on Wednesday evening we left with some new feature ideas around our Litmus testing integration, some development techniques we could look at incorporating into our email designer and some improvements we could make to our own marketing collateral. We had a great time at #LitmusLive and meeting other #emailgeeks was excellent – it’s clear that email is not dead, with these insightful speakers and email marketers pushing the boundaries of email clients to deliver results.

A round up of some of the presentation deck links…

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