Item: Litmus
Rating: 8
Author: Derrick Phipps

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Litmus in the marketing department. As an Art Director, I need to preview how my emails will look across various email clients. Of course there are slight display variances between email clients, but mainly we're looking for catastrophic breakdowns in the email. Often times it finds a critical issue in Outlook... Outlook is kind of the buzz kill in email design.

Pros and Cons

Litmus gives an accurate preview of how emails appear across various email clients
Litmus helps detect coding issues
Litmus allows users on my team to share email previews and determine whether we need to make adjustments

If I recall correctly, there used to be a browser preview functionality that is no longer available. I miss that.
I wish Litmus was able to detect why we're experiencing certain issues between email clients. It's probably wishful thinking at this point given all of the variables Litmus would need to consider in order to make a sound suggestion.

Return on Investment

Litmus helps me sleep at night knowing my emails won't go out with messed up code.
If there is an issue with an email that someone (not me) sends, we're able to track whether they tested it in Litmus or not.

Alternatives Considered

I've never used another product outside of Litmus. Litmus appears to be the industry standard in terms of email testing and I haven't heard otherwise from anyone else.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

250,000 to 1 million

Using Litmus for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Likelihood to Recommend

Litmus is great if you need to create a simple email that works well across a number of email clients. Litmus has a number of templates that can help you put together a polished email very quickly. Litmus could use a bit of help in organizing projects in folders. At the moment the way you search for a particular project is via keyword or looking them up based upon when they were created.

Litmus and I

Overall Satisfaction with Litmus