Litmus is the Holy Grail of Email Testing
August 16, 2018
Litmus is the Holy Grail of Email Testing
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Litmus
I am the sole user of Litmus (and our sole Email Marketer) and we use it to test how emails will render across all devices. I am primarily responsible for creating, testing, sending, and reporting on our emails, and know from personal experience that an email that looks or behaves poorly leads to an unsubscribe or ultimately a spam complaint. Litmus helps me ensure that no little mistake goes unnoticed. Code is very sensitive and the slightest mistake can cause all sorts of rendering problems, even if it looks perfect in Apple Mail. Outlook is notorious for emails acting wonky, and with Litmus, we are able to ensure that all our recipients get the same email experience regardless of what device they are using to view our emails.
- Email rendering, of course! That is definitely their number one asset, and the thing they do best. While I have only the spam testing feature, the device rendering tool is incredibly invaluable. Imagine having to send an email to yourself (or a list of all your hundreds of email addresses and setting them up....) and checking it not on just your Mac and iPhone, but on your PC, your Android, your iPad, your Android tablet, your older PC with Outlook 2007, checking Samsung Mail on your Android, Google Inbox on your phone, Office 365, AOL.com, Hotmail on your various devices.... my head is spinning! Litmus takes away every bit of that annoyance and lets you view the rendering in one simple location.
- Litmus also offers great webinars to help email marketers with strategy (seriously, stop spamming people - it does more harm than you can see at face value), with email development (they won't teach you how to code but will teach you how to use the tools to their full potential), and with content that provides a holistic view of email marketing as a whole. These reports offer up real, hard data and include general trends that help email marketers understand what works, what doesn't, and where they need to go with it.
- The whole email testing experience with Litmus is a breeze. It's so easy to get started and understand, it almost feels like you're doing something wrong. I love having the history of past tests too, in case I want to compare various results.
- This is more of a selfish nice-to-have, as I find no real, major issues with Litmus. But I'd like to see some sort of highlights within test results where code may have an issue. I use Sublime Text to make sure I'm coding properly, but it doesn't catch the tiny mistakes that aren't apparent in, for example, Apple Mail. I may see a perfect-looking email in Apple Mail but my colleague sees a strange mash-up of content blocks in Outlook on their PC. Being able to find the issue quickly within Litmus would be super cool, and I'd totally pay for that feature. Otherwise, I truly have no major issues and see no areas of major improvement other than cool new tools.
- The price is absolutely worth the investment. We have seen increased engagement with emails (e.g., the heat map 'lights up' in more areas, a lower unsubscribe rate, and users scrolling further down the email) and the back-and-forth between me (the creator), and my testing team has been minimized because I can catch issues before sending out the email to be tested. It significantly reduces the time it takes to create, test, and schedule an email.
- While the webinars are free, they cost time. And they're almost always worth it, even if they're just on in the background. The State of Email content they generate - and offer FOR FREE (it's a LOT of data they're giving you for free) - is an amazing side bonus. They offer a ton of email productivity tips and really helpful content. And again, for free!
- Although I haven't really mentioned this in previous sections, the Builder tool is sometimes really useful to code in also. I generally preferred Sublime Text , but lately I've been using the Builder tool instead, as it allows you to see your code changes in real time (vs loading up previews each time). Then you can save it and preview across all devices. It's a huge time saver in that sense as well.
Litmus has way more testing functions and platforms it tests (i.e., it tests across virtually every single operating system and email tool) whereas Email on Acid, while also really helpful in many instances, doesn't cover some of the inboxes many of our recipients use (we at least have the ability with our ESP [Email Service Provider] to see what devices and operating system our recipients load our emails on). Litmus just made the most sense for us, especially given the price point.
1 to 5 million