Litmus Live 2024 Recap: Key Takeaways and Highlights

Alternatively, you can go directly to the section that captures your interest the most:

1. Return on Real: A New Model for the Modern Marketer
2. Foundations of Online Marketing Success: Review-Plan-Execute
3. Decoding Churn: Strategies for Subscription Retention
4. The Art and Science of Accessibility in Email Marketing
5. How Invisible Experiences Inform the Future of Email Personalization
6. Orient Towards Impact
7. Talk Data to Me: How Storytelling Proves Email Success
8. Lessons From the World of Newsletters
9. From Conversion to Connection: Integrating Empathy Mapping Into Your Email Strategy
10. The Must Have Ecommerce Email Flows
11. The Ever-Increasing Value of Email With Other Messaging Channels In A Mobile-First World
12. Future-Proof Your Brand Like Beyoncé: Integrating Email and Social Media for Iconic Brand Longevity

Return on Real: A New Model for the Modern Marketer

Ann Handley, WSJ best-selling Author, Speaker, and the world’s 1st Chief Content Officer @ MarketingProfs

An astounding 58% of marketers consider their content strategy “moderately” effective.

Modern marketing is full of impossible standards and conflicting advice: “We have to do more but with less budget. We have more tools, but they just add to the confusion.” The path is no longer straight. The top current challenge is creating the right kind of content that prompts a desired action. 

How do we do that? Introducing RoR — Return on Real. 

95% of buyers are not actively in the market, so you must make meaningful (AKA real) connections with them until they are. At the same time, 90% of buyers ultimately choose a vendor they had in mind before they began researching.

It means that we need to rethink how we show up as marketers and email marketers:

• Double-down on brand to create emotional connection.
• Take a broader view: Retention, expansion, referral.
• Prioritize first-party data.

It’s not just about tools and technologies but about how much we show up as people, how we show our care in all channels — email, social media, website, etc. 

We have never been more connected. Yet actual connection is increasingly scarce. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer studied the question of trust in our society and came to a conclusion: “Trust is under siege”. So we need to reinvent the wheel: start with Brand, speak the Truth and optimize the Data. Top content goals should now include brand awareness, building trust, educating, building loyalty, generating leads, nurturing leads. 

If we don’t trust organizations, the only option is to trust people. Truth builds trust. 

Take Dr. G of the Orthopedic Centers of Colorado. He has an email newsletter called Rules of Thumb. It owes its popularity precisely to the fact that it doesn’t feel like coming from an institution but from a human being.

Build relationships and not audiences.

Show us your humans:

• Use you.
• A pillow over the face of “Dear Valued Customers”.
• Use their actual words.
• Deliver an It’s-Me moment: help people see themselves.
• One reader… not readers.
• Voice their inner thoughts out loud.

Foundations of Online Marketing Success: Review-Plan-Execute

Dave Charest, Director, Small Business Success @ Constant Contact

1. Reviewing your online marketing approach and tools.

Word-of-mouth is happening online. You need to provide a wow experience, entice people to stay in touch, make them engage regularly and get them back to the store.

Tools for this: 

• Social media (but be wary because they are ruled by algorithms) for public actions, engagement, and reaching a new audience.
• Email for reaching an audience directly, building loyalty and driving sales.
• Text: timely, relevant and exclusive. 

2. Planning marketing efforts to support goals.

The tools are the same for everyone but how you use them is different. Your specific goals set the strategic plan. 

• A mobile-responsive website. What is it? Who is it for? So what? What should they do next? 
• Entice customers to provide contact info with promotions and discounts, exclusive content, showing support. 
• Greet contacts with an automated welcome email. Send immediately after someone signs up. Consider a welcome series.
• Engage at key moments. Automate based on dates and shopping cart integrations.
• Is SMS better suited? 
• Include two types of emails in the strategy: promotional and non-promotional. 
• Determine YOUR best send frequency. 
• Focus on one channel at a time.

3. Executing simple actions to boost marketing productivity. 

Write down three marketing goals to focus on. Choose one and make a plan.

After a while, review the progress, using tools and integrations between them, including AI tools and features.

Decoding Churn: Strategies for Subscription Retention

Anna Levitin

CRM & Lifecycle Marketing Lead @ DoorLoop

Churn is the number of customers who stop doing business with a company over a certain period of time. The churn rate formula is: (Lost Customers ÷ Total Customers at the Start of Time Period) x 100. 

The most important thing is that churn makes revenue less predictable.

Three pillars of user engagement:

1. Frequency — it measures how often a user interacts with your product or service.
2. Recency — the amount of time a user stays interactive.
3. Depth — level of engagement (for example, product adoption stage).

To understand churn, the best way is to analyze over a dozen metrics from churn ARR Cohort to churn on Renewal. But if you are shorthanded like most marketers and entrepreneurs, you can start small. 

• Segment — industry, location, size, contract.
• Satisfaction — CSAT, NPS, MAU, usage ratio.
• Activity — features, upsell.
• Engagement — webinars, support tickets, community.
• Organization — ARR, management, product.
• Tech stack — competitors, other solutions.

Once we get this data, use it:

• Short-term: instant gratification, special offers, customer engagement.
• Long-term: community building, customization and flexibility, value-added benefits.

Make use of AI tools like chatbots. As any other technology, AI needs time for adoption.

The Art and Science of Accessibility in Email Marketing

Lauren Castady, Associate Creative Director at Oracle Digital Experience Agency, and Sarah Gallardo, Lead Email Accessibility Developer at Oracle Digital Experience Agency

More than 28% of adult US citizens live with some type of disability, reading emails and buying products. Not catering to these people leads to lost profits and legal issues. In 2023, 4,600 lawsuits were filed for digital non-compliance.

Types of accessibility-focused companies:

• Wanting what everyone else is doing without accessibility affecting the visuals or aesthetics.
• Wanting to meet basic accessibility standards.
• Wanting the best experience and having a dedicated accessibility team or goals.

To understand, where your company falls on this spectrum, ask these questions:

• Is there an internal accessibility team? 
• Can the team be involved in the process to address specific concerns?
• What steps have been taken towards achieving the accessibility goals?
• What challenges have you encountered?

Design ideation and accessibility integration

When ideating for accessibility, take into consideration the objective and scope. Does the project align with one of these categories: designing within an existing modular system, expanding an existing modular system, or building from scratch?

After that, there are several next steps and action items:

• Gather previous emails and look at the website to assess the current state of the email system.
• Clarify and set the project goals.
• Implement industry best practices and accessibility standards.
• Collaborate with development partners.

Not all companies start with a modular email system, but it is very useful and ensures consistency. A modular email architecture is:

• A collection of interchangeable modules that work together to house creative content.
• A tool to define the hierarchy of module types and create the right structure for a campaign or template.

It also uses the creative and development best practices and can be updated over time when business goals change. 

When deciding what content and elements get incorporated into the modules, use inclusive design principles:

• Live text 
• Text hierarchy (using different font sizes to distinguish between body copy and headings) 
• Color contrast
• Alt text
• Clear calls to action (the CTA uses live text, the whole button is clickable, its width is not fixed, and it has room for scaling)
• Flexible design (scannable content that users can engage with however they like)
• Dark mode

To make sure your brand colors look good in dark mode, conduct a color inversion test on different platforms. To make your design more flexible and easy to read, use shorter content blocks with headers and subheaders. For the scroll strategy, use an inverted pyramid or S-curve layout, large images and lots of white space. Always consider both the mobile and desktop versions of an email. 

Use clear and readable fonts and also have fall-back fonts. At the same time, the design needs to be flexible to account for font drift — a change in text flow between different email clients and users who use and don’t use accessibility technology. 

Most of the email carousels are not accessible. But a Kinetic Slider that doesn’t have typical left-to-eight controls is accessible and can be used in the same scenarios as a carousel. 

How to advocate for accessibility:

• Detail the specific issue. Clearly explain a suggestion’s impact on accessibility in simple terms (like color contrast, font size, navigation challenges). 
• Provide alternatives. Offer different options that meet business goals and vision while complying with accessibility standards.
• Encourage open dialogue. Discuss a compromise between exploring new ideas and committing to accessibility and emphasize the positive impact of accessibility.

Use Oracle’s accessibility checklist to get inclusive design ideas for your content.

How Invisible Experiences Inform the Future of Email Personalization

Jessica Liu, Principal Analyst at Forrester, and Jessica Materna, Director, Product and Partner Marketing at Litmus

Consumers choose from 4.7 devices, 4 platforms (social media, messengers, etc.), and 5.4 channels (browser, email, push, etc.). A company must win in customers’ moments — “points in time and space when a person interacts with a brand to get what they want immediately and in context.”

A moment is built of:

• Who (consumer)
• What (content or service a company is delivering)
• When (trigger)
• Where (touchpoint: what channel, what device, platform, interface)

Future moments will be more invisible and immersive. Brands will anticipate the needs of their customers so well, that consumers will engage less frequently but more meaningfully. Invisibility means that more activity will happen below the glass (the screen of a smartphone, smartwatch, etc.). All the inner workings that create a moment (sending an alert, product update or offer) will happen below the glass. 

The invisible moments will be about providing unprecedented convenience through actions, suggestions, information, removing steps for customers, and offering simplicity. Immersive experiences are about using a chat, voice commands, AR/VR, or metaverse. 

Moments happen everywhere in a customer journey or lifecycle:

• Discover: advertising moment (click on social media ads or search results)
• Evaluate: influence moment (read reviews or view product details)
• Commit: sales moment (complete planned or impulse purchase)
• Initiate: product moment (follow setup instructions, read tutorials)
• Participate: support moment (contact customer service or connect with peers)
• Actualize: value moment (view offers and recommended products, track loyalty program)
• Advocate: loyalty moment (leave a positive review, refer someone)

Examples of good anticipatory moments: 

• An HP printer is connected to Amazon’s home device with Alexa and can tell Amazon when the ink is running low. Amazon informs the customer about this fact and recommends compatible cartridges.
• A utility company sends an anticipatory text message about power outages and times when power is going to be restored.
• A smartwatch sends a notification about bedtime and encourages the customer to turn off sleep mode if they are still awake.
• A public transport card company sends an in-app notification when the user is low on balance and suggests topping up the card.

The endgame of personalization is an invisible moment, happening on different levels of depth:

• Personalization based on segmentation — less individualized customer moments with general customer data. 
• Personalization based on a discrete customer interaction — less individualized customer moments with specific customer data.
• Personalization based on contextual understanding and anticipating individual needs in a precise moment — more individualized customer moments with specific customer data.
• Personalization based on preset or personas or customer-determined journeys — more individualized customer moments with general customer data. 

Personalization needs to be relevant and also valuable. Value can be symbolic (status, feeling appreciated and respected), economic (money or rewards), functional (useful products or services), and experiential (pleasant interactions and easy transactions).

Consumers care the most about personalization tactics tied to economic value, for functional value, they like personalized help. They look for familiar and personalized sensations to have positive experiential value. For symbolic value, they prefer loyalty personalization over ad relevance. 

Paving the path for invisible moments

Email is relevant across the entire customer journey. To use email to create customer moments:

• Listen to your audience and learn from them using live polls and email analytics.
• Make it effortless: proactively share the details that matter most and show relevant location-based content. 
• Create urgency for key moments: use countdown timers and social proof (for example, how many people are viewing the same listing).
• Build relationships with value milestones and use progress bars showing the purchase or loyalty program journey of the customer.
• Show them you know them: connect all content about each customer and create custom barcodes, provide relevant information about current status and past engagement.

Orient Towards Impact

Drew Price, Lifecycle Marketing Advisor @ Scaling CRM

Here are 8 principles for the Modern Lifecycle Marketer:

1. Be a truth seeker. For example, instead of assuming the best based on a short-term result, conduct longitudinal testing of downstream influence using holdback groups.
2. Kill your darlings. Make sure to do a regular health check on your programs and measure incrementality. 
3. Value realization as a north star. Above all else, help them realize product value at scale, what value they’ve gotten so far and how to get even more.
4. Fill product gaps. Act as a product, not as a traditional marketing. Meaning, we get to create net/new experiences, features and content. So, don’t always lean into email as a gateway. Lean into email as a product.
5. Beware! Internal marketing scope creep. Our primary audience is our customers and not appeasing internal politics. If you notice internal marketing bloat, advocate for change.
6. New tools: use cases matter most. The number of new tools has gone up significantly, but there are no silver bullets. What matters is how and why the tools are used.
7. Be careful about how you choose and achieve your metrics. Speaks for itself.
8. Take big swings. Get comfortable with innovation and stop being so married to 1-variable testing. The bigger the swings, the more likely to unlock wins. 

Talk Data to Me: How Storytelling Proves Email Success

Lauren Meyer, Chief Marketing Officer @ Socket Labs

Emotions contribute to 90% of our decisions. So why not use them to justify your ideas and decisions with data-driven storytelling? 

In other words, once you have data, use it creatively:

• Identify problems with the technical bits, list quality and sender rep.
• Understand what your recipients like and more of it.
• Justify the need for change, especially in the case of large changes.
• Show, don’t tell.
• Think impact: tell the story behind the numbers. Replace technical jargon with data-backed insight into email performance. Tie issues to their potential impact on revenue, customer retention and overall business performance.
• Prove your value. Protect and expand your company’s investment in email.

Ways to drive engagement:

Find your emotional hook —> Build excitement —> Reinforce and maintain the excitement —> Get ‘em hooked before diving into details —> Make it clear why you’re different from competitors —> Continue the momentum.

Lessons From the World of Newsletters

Dan Oshinsky, Manager @ Inbox Collective

Newsletters are built on:

• A clearly identified audience. The newsletter that’ for everyone is usually for no one. Every email should be written for a specific audience.
• A clearly identified job. How can the team behind a newsletter make decisions based on what will best serve the audience? It might be about education, connection, engagement, action, entertainment or the combination of several purposes.
• A clearly identified sense of why. There has to be a clear reason why a newsletter is worth making space in inboxes, boiled down to just a  single sentence.

Newsletters keep learning more about their audience to target the right readers with the right messages. They might do that by using a survey on the site, through lead magnets or events or via in-newsletter asks.

Newsletters get creative with how they move readers through a newsletter: using bolding and bullets, different formats or being text-only.

Newsletters engage. Ask questions, the more specific, the better; extend the conversation with readers, use polls or sections that highlight answers from readers.  

Newsletters lean into different formats. Not just one format or topic but multiple options from daily newsletters to short-run products like email courses. Offering multiple newsletters means readers can choose how they engage with the brand.

Newsletters focus on building a habit. They come out at a consistent day/time and follow a consistent format.

Newsletters measure success in multiple ways: growth, engagement, monetization, reader feedback. 

Newsletters rely on four strategies to grow:

• Owned growth: creating landing pages, adding sign-up modules, asking to sign up on story pages, etc.
• Earned growth: promoting on another channel or event, cross-promotion with another newsletter, etc. 
• Algorithmic growth: using a link in bio, promotion on social channels, etc.
• Paid growth: advertising on Facebook or other channels, running a giveaway, building a referral program, etc.

Newsletters don’t rely on any one revenue stream, best-in-class newsletters typically have 3+ ways to monetize their audience: reader revenue like subscription or membership, selling ads, products, merch, services, rockets to events, etc.

Newsletters experiment with different CTAs to drive revenue, ranging from text-based appeals to “letters within the letter”.

Newsletters take a story-based approach to selling: they rotate through different messages from different people.

From Conversion to Connection: Integrating Empathy Mapping Into Your Email Strategy

Dayana Kibilds, Vice President of Strategy at Ologie

A typical customer journey involves taking people from not knowing about the company to being loyal. This typically means constantly being in contact and sharing information. Despite marketers’ intentions, emails can still miss the mark.   

The empathy map is a way to achieve customers’ loyalty while appreciating their emotions. Like the customer journey, this matrix is flexible. The empathy map has 4 quadrants:

• Thinking — questions they have and information they seek.
• Feeling — emotions they feel through their journey.
• Seeing and hearing — external influences and stimuli.
• Doing — routines and distractions.

Most emails are Thinking emails with offers, promotions, and information. But customers spend quite a lot of time in other quadrants. Emails need to bring together the customer journey and the empathy map to address what customers need and what they’re going through.  

1. In the awareness stage, send Seeing or Hearing emails that relate your brand to something else in the customer’s life, use social proof, and try to make a connection. Where did they learn about you? How did you get their information?
2. The consideration stage is the most information-heavy, so send Thinking emails.
3. In the action stage, customers may experience strong emotions, so match them with Feeling emails. Make your customers feel good about the products or services they bought, validate them. 
4. At the stewardship stage, send Doing emails. Show how your brand can be a part of the customer’s life and have shared experiences that aren’t necessarily related to the product or service you sell. 

An abandoned cart email can be a Feeling email as it happens on the action stage. But instead of making your customers feel bad or guilty for not checking out, make them feel good about the product they were considering, validate them.

The Must Have Ecommerce Email Flows

Chase Dimond, Partner at Structured

3 main types of emails:

• Campaign — a one-time send to a group of people. For example, a holiday email.
• Flow — triggered every time a certain behavior occurs, core email automations. For example, an abandoned cart email.
• Transactional email — similar to flows but typically for activities after people purchase. For example, order confirmation. 

Pre-purchase flows

Welcome series

Goals of the welcome emails: deliver pop-up incentives like a 10% discount (if applicable), build trust with social proof, offer value through content, create brand affinity through a brand story and USP, answer questions and objections, get the purchase or close enough to the purchase.

Abandonment flows

Most brands miss at least one of those. 

• Site abandonment — a customer was active on the site but hadn’t viewed a product page.
• Browse abandonment — a customer viewed a product.
• Abandoned cart — a customer added a product to the cart.
• Abandoned checkout — a customer started the checkout.

Post-purchase flows

Thank you and product education

This email is an opportunity to show your appreciation to the customer and strengthen your bond, reduce remorse. If customer education is relevant to your product, this can be a series of emails addressing different aspects of product usage. This can not only make the customer enjoy their purchase more but also lighten the load of your support team.

Replenishment flow

The goal of this flow is to remind the customer that they are about to run out of product and to motivate them to make another purchase. If you have a subscription, ask the customers who made 2 purchases, to subscribe using a special subscription flow.

Immediate cross-sell and upsell is a strategy of sending customers who just bought something emails that encourage them to buy more with a discount.

VIP emails 

These flows use RFM segmentation (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) to retain your best customers. Have different VIP customer groups and treat them differently:

• Soulmates — very recent, very frequent, highest monetary value.
• Lovers — quite recent, not very frequent, low-value products.
• New passions — very recent, not yet frequent, high-value products.

You can find your VIP customers among those who are big spenders and/or frequent buyers but also bought recently.

How to treat your VIPs:

• Give exclusive discounts.
• Offer exclusive access (private Facebook group).
• Share exclusive content (high-quality insight or information).
• Show glimpses of new releases.
• Offer priority customer support.
• Give surprise gifts.
• Send personalized thank you cards.

The Ever-Increasing Value of Email With Other Messaging Channels In A Mobile-First World

Lee Munroe, Head of Design at OneSignal

It’s all about connected experiences — synchronized customer interactions across a variety of platforms and devices that create an integrated user experience.

• Mobile push for real-time updates and inactive users’ re-engagement
• In-app messages for opt-ins, trials, upsells, surveys, and ratings
• Live activities for dynamic event tracking, order updates, sports scores
• Email for newsletters, abandoned cart messages, sales, and app downloads
• SMS for promos, alerts, updates, security verifications
• Web push for news, blog posts, offers, anonymous visitors

Key takeaways from OneSignal’s The 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report:

• Using more than one messaging channel increases average engagement by 35%.
• Apps that use in-app messages see 27% higher retention rates.
• Apps that use iOS live activities report a higher average LTV:CAC (Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio.
• Apps that use email as part of their engagement strategy report the highest install-to-purchase conversion rates.

Using a combination of email, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS, Betmate was able to increase their MAU (Monthly Active Users) by 600% and their user spending per month by 625%. 

Live activities is the newest channel that can help keep your app top of mind. Benefits of live activities:

• Beyond the app engagement with a wider audience (the app doesn’t need to be open)
• Stickier experience (live activities offer a persistent presence on the lock screen and within the iOS Dynamic Island)
• Frictionless UX
• Increased interaction
• More customization options (images, animations, buttons, etc.)

Live activities best practices:

• Best suited for activities with clearly defined starts and ends like delivery updates, rideshare statuses, sports events.
• Should always provide value, live activities are not for ads. 
• Add gamification elements to increase engagement.
• Use deep links to direct users to a specific location within your app and create a seamless user experience.
• Avoid displaying sensitive information as live activities are highly visible on the screen.  
• Make your first live activity great, so users will allow other live activities from your app.
• Present only the most important information as the space is limited. 
• Check your custom backgrounds in light and dark mode for optimal presentation.

Future-Proof Your Brand Like Beyoncé: Integrating Email and Social Media for Iconic Brand Longevity

Carlos Gil, Brand Evangelist at GetResponse

Beyoncé is a great example for marketers because she withstood the test of time.

Forget about everything you’ve been told about social media, throw out your strategies from 5-6 years ago, they no longer work. People go to social media for escapism and not for content marketing.

Marketers compete for market share and attention not only with other brands but with people — everyday people, content creators, and influencers. That’s why it’s important to humanize your brand, give it a real human face instead of a logo.

• Pay for reach.
• Optimize your content to engage and not to sell (removing calls to action and appeals to conversion, for example). Give value in the form of education, inspiration, or entertainment.

The effectiveness of your social media content should be measured not by visibility (impressions), but by engagement (interactions).

Many brands perceive social media platforms as being free without realizing how precarious their position is. If a platform is banned or something happens with the account, you lose everything you worked towards. It’s important to use social media with caution and add email marketing to your strategy.

How to merge social media with email marketing:

• Convert your social media followers into email subscribers.
• Use social media’s powerful discovery function right by creating content that engages.
• Use the freemium to premium strategy. Engage your followers with free educational, inspirational, or entertaining social media content and then lead them to your exclusive, paid email content.
• Think of your social media content as microdoses — something that is just the right length to engage but leaves the audience wanting more. Sweet spot or video content is between 15 to 30 seconds. For images on social media, use emotions.
• Think of your email as a VIP section of your brand. You need to tailor your content to a specific audience like a demographic within the industry or a type of consumer. 
• Offer exclusive content in your newsletter.
• Use marketing automation to boost efficiency and engagement, save time, scale seamlessly, and integrate easily.

How to future-proof your brand like Beyoncé: 

• Make a robust email list and continuously refine it.
• Integrate data across email, social media, and SMS.
• Create consistent cross-channel content with a unified brand voice.
• Use automation and AI tools for content management.
• Encourage cross-channel subscriptions and promote multi-channel subscriptions with exclusive incentives.
• Monitor and adapt to platform changes.
• Integrate SMS for direct and instant communication.
• Be strategic about your content instead of just posting more.