Lean messaging teams can do a lot if the process is right. If not, even well-staffed teams can quickly find themselves stuck scrambling to get the next email out the door, waiting to hit the next deadline. A team that is constantly fighting to keep its head above water will not be happy in the long run. Plus, it spares your team one of the most exciting aspects of email marketing: experimentation. Getting your process right means giving your team leeway to mix day-to-day tasks with projects that break the routine. It could be a set of A/B tests, experiments with new coding or design techniques, or a chance to design a unique email that's different from your standard template. Every experience, successful or not, offers your team the opportunity to learn and be challenged. My email process is interrupted. And now? Have you nodded yes to any of the warning signs above? The good news is that recognizing that your email E-Commerce Photo Editing Service process isn't perfect is the crucial first step to improving it. And we're here to help. Contact a Litmus expert and find out how Litmus can help streamline your email workflow so you can get better emails, faster..Email rendering is complex and changes without warning. Unlike web development, where a handful of browsers impact rendering, the highly fragmented email landscape means that each email has over 15,000 different potential renderers . The challenge is to manage and control this variability through savvy coding and design. And you can't do that if you don't test the look and functionality of every email you create. Ensuring compatibility across clients and devices is one of the biggest challenges for email marketers, and your email process needs to be set up to help your team meet this challenge. If you don't know how your email performs across all platforms or only have a limited view of a handful of inboxes that you manually test, you put your brand at risk of providing below average subscriber experience to a portion of your subscribers.

Email rendering is complex and changes without warning. Unlike web development, where a handful of browsers impact rendering, the highly fragmented email landscape means that each email has over 15,000 different potential renderers . The challenge is to manage and control this variability through savvy coding and design. And you can't do that if you don't test the look and functionality of every email you create. Ensuring compatibility across clients and devices is one of the biggest challenges for email marketers, and your email process needs to be set up to help your team meet this challenge. If you don't know how your email performs across all platforms or only have a limited view of a handful of inboxes that you manually test, you put your brand at risk of providing below average subscriber experience to a portion of your subscribers. Emails that don't render well and look faulty won't work, and all the time your team spends writing, designing, and developing will be Image Masking Service wasted. hard copies, and voicemails, usually with no insight into what others have suggested, edited or commented on, you are probably wasting too much time in this step of the process. Streamline your email review process with Litmus Proof With Proof as your centralized feedback collection tool, you can improve collaboration, gain better visibility, and reduce review cycles. Read more → 3. You do a lot of manual copying and pasting. Mundane and repetitive tasks slow your team down and introduce room for error. So if you and your team are doing a lot of manual work on repetitive tasks, that's a sign that your messaging process needs improvement. Brands that send their emails correctly find ways to replace manual work wherever possible, which increases productivity, leaves less room for error, and saves time and money.

Email accessibility was voted one of the hottest email design trends of 2019 and is now a priority for the majority of brands. But it's also true that many marketers don't know where to start to make their emails more inclusive. Implementing accessibility best practices is easier than you think. In this webinar, Litmus accessibility experts Jason Rodriguez and Alice Li walk through the stats and research that prove investing in accessibility is worth it and share the 3 steps you'll need to take to create better email. electronics for everyone. Didn't get a chance to watch the webinar live? Do not worry. You can access the full recording at any time and read the Q&A below. Questions and answers A big thank you to everyone who responded to the webinar with a question! Here's a recap of our answers to the most common questions, as well as our take on some of the questions we didn't answer during the live webinar. Do you have additional questions? Please leave them in the comments. How do you explain E-Commerce Photo Editing Service cognitive limitations? Bettina : There are many types of cognitive disabilities, from difficulty remembering things or paying attention to dyslexia or autism. Each of these requirements is unique, but following the advice in the writing and design section of this webinar will go a long way to making your emails more accessible to people with cognitive limitations. For example, keep your email copy clear and concise and avoid using difficult words or jargon. Keep your layouts simple and develop a clear visual hierarchy that makes it easy for your subscribers to scan your email and quickly understand what's important (and what's not). What is the most used screen reader? How do you test it? Alice: The two most popular screen readers are NVDA and JAWS . NVDA is a free and open source tool developed by NV Access. It 's an amazing organization dedicated to making technology more accessible to people with visual impairments. JAWS is a popular subscription-based screen reader tool. If you don't want to install software to understand how your email would sound on a screen reader, you can use Litmus for that! We recently integrated NVDA into Litmus, so you can now listen to an audio preview of your email directly in the Litmus Watchlist. Learn more . Additionally, all modern operating systems also offer some kind of native screen reading support. On Mac for example, that's VoiceOver . Which brands are doing a great job optimizing their emails for accessibility? I would like some inspiration!

While most screen readers understand emojis and can read them, that might not be the optimal experience for users. Let's listen to NVDA read this sample subject line with an emoji: The biggest sale of the year You can hear how rambling an emoji sounds next to the text. Although emojis are now commonplace and assistive technology users are probably used to hearing them, it can still feel awkward depending on the emoji. Like any other element or copy in an email, the best way to see if it works or not is to test it and listen to your email using a tool like NVDA or the email checker. Litmus accessibility. Should I also apply "role=presentation" to DIVs? Alice : No! role="presentation" is only meant to tell screen readers to ignore the semantic meaning of markup, so tables need this because tabular data such as charts require all column and row information so that people can read through them and understand them properly. In emails, developers often rely on tables for presentation rather than tabular data, which is why tables require it. DIVs, on the other hand, have no semantic meaning that should be replaced for screen readers. For customers who insist on using image-based emails, are there best practices to follow? Bettina : It's hard! There are countless reasons why sending image-only emails is a terrible idea. So first, do everything you can to convince your customer that this Image Masking Service approach comes with a horrible subscriber experience. Our blog post on why you shouldn't send image-only emails has lots of information and tips to help you make your case. If there's no way to put your client on the right track, all you can do is optimize your off-image view with ALT text ( you can even style that ALT text ) and use Bulletproof buttons so that at least your CTAs still work when images are disabled. Does using web fonts impact accessibility? Alice : Code-wise, it shouldn't. From a design perspective, this means that you should always ensure that the web font and its web safe backup meet contrast ratio standards to be readable. For example, if your web font is thicker than the fallback, just make sure the fallback also passes the contrast ratio scores, because the fallback is what users of, say, Gmail might see instead. The only change we haven't made to our code model is the use of the semantic element for headings or paragraphs. We are currently styling the table cell for the text. What issues can this pose for accessibility? Alice : I guess the table that wraps the text already has its role set to 'presentation' or 'none' to limit unnecessary noise from the screen reader. So, aside from this issue, not using the correct heading/paragraph tags would present a navigational problem for assistive devices, as some technologies allow users to jump between headings (and its associated paragraphs) like if it was a table of contents.

One of my favorites is deque . They do a lot of accessibility training, have an amazing blog and great emails! Their emails not only follow accessibility best practices but also have great content that helps you learn more about the subject. You should sign up for their newsletter ! At the risk of sounding conceited, I was very impressed with the work Alice and the messaging team did on the Litmus newsletter . Not only is it beautifully designed, but they've put a lot of effort into making it accessible based on the best practices outlined in The Ultimate Guide to Email Accessibility. Do you have any insight into the difference between tools like "Alexa" or "Siri" from other screen readers? Or Outlook's “read aloud” feature? Jason : In a recent episode of the Delivering podcast, I dove into voice assistants. I found out that Alexa is the only one that really reads your email, but it will only read HTML text, ignoring alt attributes, tables, or any other HTML elements. This is different from how a screen reader would process emails. Voice E-Commerce Photo Editing Service assistants are geared towards convenience, not necessarily accessibility, so they don't work the same way as a full-featured screen reader like NVDA does, for example. In many cases, you still need your phone or laptop to navigate content, the voice assistant just helps. For a comprehensive look at how Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and Cortana handle email, tune in to this podcast episode. What about animated GIFs? Use them or not? Do they cause problems for readers? Alice : You can use them, but be careful how. Animations can trigger photosensitive seizures , so you'll never want to include an overly jarring or flashing GIF. You also don't want to include crucial information like the copy in your GIFs. The hidden copy in your GIF isn't accessible to screen readers - and it won't show up in email clients where images are disabled - so you risk losing crucial parts of your email.

Enticing your subscribers to open your email causes a mismatch between expectations and actual experience, and it won't pay off in the long run. Misleading subject lines can help increase open rates, but they will also leave subscribers frustrated and disappointed. This, in turn, can lead to higher unsubscribe rates, higher spam reports, and lower click-through rates and, more importantly, could destroy subscribers' trust in your brand. Instead, earn openness, with respectful and relevant posts that earn your followers' time. Misleading subject lines are against the law The prospect of disappointed and frustrated subscribers should already be reason enough for marketers to steer clear of misleading subject lines. But there's more: In many countries, using misleading subject lines also violates the law. In the United States, for example, the CAN-SPAM Act explicitly prohibits the use of misleading subject headings: "It is illegal for any person to initiate the transmission E-Commerce Photo Editing Service to a protected computer of a commercial electronic mail message if that person has actual knowledge, or fairly implied knowledge based on objective circumstances, that a header of the message would be likely to mislead a recipient, acting reasonably in the circumstances, of a material fact regarding the content or subject matter of the message. Similar rules also exist in Germany (Telemedia Act) and Canada (CASL and Competition Act), among others. Avis and Budget Car learned this the hard way in 2015 , when Canada's Competition Bureau fined the companies C$30 million for violating Canada's anti-spam regulations. According to the Bureau, Avis and Budget Car had used misleading discount information in the subject line and body text of their promotional emails. Creative or misleading? Share your examples and thoughts with the community Do you have any other examples of subject lines that cross the line from creative to misleading? Share them with the community, chime in as we discuss examples, and help us and our fellow email marketers learn from each other. Share your sample emails