Day #2 and we’re back at the Boston Seaport World Trade Center to learn more about making totally awesome emails.
The day gets kicked off with a very analytical session from Matt Laudato from Constant Contact. Big data condensed down to give marketers some insights into what works best in email. Number of CTAs, where to place hyperlinks, when to send emails and the optimal email layout were presented. These are great tips to squeeze out that last little bit of performance from your email, but make sure you start with great content, design and development first.
Then, Fabio Carneiro from MailChimp presented what was in our opinion the biggest takeaway from Day #2. Marketers need to focus on satisfying all recipients, not only those who’s email clients/devices support media queries. Historically, it has not been possible to create ‘responsive’ emails for clients that do not support media queries, namely Gmail and Outlook. However, using a new development method called Spongy (or fluid hybrid) it is now possible to create ‘responsive’ emails without media queries. Fabio actually said it was ‘impossible’ to create responsive emails for Gmail, but what he showed in his demo looked pretty responsive to us! This is how all of MailChimp’s templates are coded and will be how all Knak’s email templates are coded as well. More information about this development method can be found here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-a-future-proof-responsive-email-without-media-queries–cms-23919
Mike Nelson from Really Good Emails, showed us just that. He runs a blog called reallygoodemails.com, a place to go to get inspiration for your next email campaign. Basically Matt shows off the best emails in the universe (that he’s received in his inbox). He ran through some of the best emails he’s seen over the last little while featuring the likes of – Litmus, Shopify and others. 2 out of 5 from our recent blog post on ‘5 Companies that Send Awesome Emails‘ – not bad!
Ryan Merrill from Food52 talked about the use of templates! A subject that is near and dear to our hearts. Ryan was struggling with people with limited experience with HTML and CSS who needed to produce their emails. As a result he was spending hours and hours of his day troubleshooting messy and broken HTML code. Finally he got tired of it and built his own template tool. Marketers still need to go into the HTML, but with building blocks Ryan created, it made it much easier for them to crank out all the emails they needed to.
The day wrapped up with a panel session featuring some of the speakers from the conference. It was a good way to wrap up the day and the conference. What a blur! It went by so fast. We definitely want to give a shout out to Litmus for hosting an amazing event. We will definitely be coming back next year!
