How Two Successful Brands Use Litmus to QA, Test, and Stay in the Inbox

This case study is presented thanks to Litmus, the all-in-one marketing platform that empowers you to build, test, review, and analyze emails more efficiently and effectively than ever so you can get the most out of every send. Optimize and personalize your emails to maximize ROI and create exceptional brand experiences for every subscriber. Learn why 700,000+ professionals across companies of all industries and sizes trust Litmus to make every send count.™

Email deliverability may seem simple — Was your email delivered as intended? — but it’s actually a nuanced and complex process. If you’re in the business of sending emails at scale, deliverability is key to ensuring your campaigns get seen by your readers and customers.

In essence, email deliverability is about making sure that your emails land in the inbox instead of the spam or junk folder. You can put time, effort, and money into your email program, but if your emails don’t land in the inbox, all that hard work will be for naught. Email can be a great tool for engaging with your audience and drive a high return on your investment — but first, you have to have great deliverability.

More email senders are starting to make deliverability a priority. In May, Litmus released their 2023 State of Email Workflows Report, their annual survey findings on all things email workflow data, trends, and best practices. While 4% of respondents claimed email deliverability as their email marketing responsibility, 37% said they’re prioritizing better understanding of deliverability in the next 12 months.

Understanding the basics of deliverability

Deliverability can be confusing — but there are a few steps every sender should take to make sure they stay in the inbox.

Start with the technical steps. There are a few foundational tactics every sender should implement:

• Authenticate your emails using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
• Make sure you’re working with a reputable email service provider.
• Only send messages to readers who knowingly opted in.
• Allow readers to easily unsubscribe from emails they no longer want to receive.
• Regularly audit your email infrastructure to make sure you’re staying on top of current best practices.

And then there are the engagement best practices that complement those technical steps:

• Segmenting your list to make sure you’re sending the right emails to the right audience.
• Using personalization to make sure your emails feel customized to each reader.
• And though it sounds basic: Knowing what your subscribers want to receive and delivering that type of content to them.

But there’s one more crucial step that can help you stay out of the spam folder: Testing.

Best-in-class organizations make sure to put their emails through a QA, or quality assurance, phase. Before they send an email — whether it’s going out to 100 readers or 100,000 — they run their emails through a series of tests.

These organizations understand that even if they’ve taken care of the technical steps, and even if their segmentation and engagement is right, a mailbox like Gmail might still mark their email as spam. 

Why? Maybe there’s a broken link in the email. Maybe a bit of code breaks and triggers a spam issue. Maybe the size of the email is too large, so readers click the “Report Spam” button instead of unsubscribing. Maybe the audience doesn’t recognize the sent-from name, resulting in unusually low engagement.

That’s where a tool like Litmus comes in. Their email testing tool allows you to QA every email before it goes live. When you’re working on a deadline, you need answers to key questions quickly:

• Is there an issue with our email authentication?
• Did our email pass through spam filters?
• Was our sending domain found on a blocklist?
• Are images or links breaking in our emails?

Litmus’s QA tool helps you quickly get answers to all of those questions.

So let’s look at how two brands, Peapod Digital Labs and BoyleSports, use Litmus’s QA tool to make sure their emails are error-free, every time — and that they always stay in the inbox.

Identifying potential issues from the start

Eduardo Rodriguez, customer campaign analyst at Peapod Digital Labs, has been using Litmus for over four years across his company’s portfolio of national grocery retailers, reaching millions of email subscribers. As he told it, Litmus helped solve multiple issues at scale for Peapod Digital Labs, from the actual build of emails to highlighting potential issues and educating his grocery retailer partners, like Food Lion and Stop & Shop, on ways to solve them.

“When I joined the company, templates were HTML-based, there was no drag-and-drop,” Eduardo said. “They were using a third-party company to run emails but we wanted to bring it in-house. I knew that every single inbox treats emails differently and wanted to preview them all. Litmus went from a neat new tool in our arsenal to indispensable in every deployment.”

Among Litmus’s essential tools is its preview option, which lets customers preview how emails look in over 100 email clients, apps and devices to ensure emails are on-brand and error-free. A positive user experience can lead to high engagement, a crucial component of deliverability.

Eduardo’s company, Peapod Digital Labs, supports household-name grocery brands in delivering a wide array of emails, from weekly ads and personalized rewards program reminders to a 14-part welcome series for new subscribers. The workflow is collaborative. Eduardo works with each brand on their campaigns, both ongoing and ad hoc, and each brand has its own design guidelines and team of designers. 

Trying to juggle so many different brands and guidelines seems like a challenge, but Eduardo said Litmus helped his team turn that obstacle into a massive opportunity.

In 2021, around the time Apple rolled out their Mail Privacy Protection feature, Eduardo’s team ran a test to understand how this might affect their email strategy. At Peapod Digital Labs, they’ve implemented a rigorous testing process: “We always run tests that are at least a month long and view reports weekly,” he said. “Mostly because not everyone opens emails on the day they receive them, some wait for the weekend when they do their grocery shopping. So as the data rolls in, we look at it that following week.”

For this test, they implemented Litmus’s tracking pixel into the emails. The pixel’s designed to deliver more data than what you might get from the typical email service provider, including data around MPP-affected opens and in-email read time.

And with this test, Eduardo’s team immediately spotted a major trend: One-third of their audience are Dark Mode users.

“Brands were surprised at the number of customers who were using Dark Mode,” he said. “When they’d delivered designs, they never factored in how Dark Mode might render their imagery. This crucial bit of data reminded us that we must respect the customers’ decision. We can’t force them to view emails any other way, so the responsibility to adapt was on us.”

Sharing these results alongside Litmus articles about Dark Mode and deliverability helped Eduardo raise awareness and educate his retail partners. Now, as part of the workflow, he’s making sure to spend extra time previewing how images and text are displayed across multiple devices, including those utilizing Dark Mode.

“The design itself has changed in working toward Dark Mode friendliness,” he said. “We look at multiple things when design assets are delivered: Can .jpegs with white backgrounds be .png images with transparent backgrounds? What about fonts that are baked into imagery, can they be made in colors that work in both Light and Dark Mode? If we need the white background, we make it look like it was intentional by putting a bevel around the image, like looking through a window.”

That sort of QA might not seem like it has an obvious impact on deliverability, but delivering error-free and user-friendly emails has paid dividends for the Peapod Digital Labs team.

“Deliverability and the way those emails render and look have seen a significant improvement,” Eduardo said. “We’ve even seen a slight bump in click-through rate just because emails are rendering better.”

Testing for multiple segments at scale

Neil Wright, head of CRM and promotions at BoyleSports, is a 20-year industry veteran who’s been using Litmus for three years. “Email is our most important channel,” Neil said. And he’s in good company. According to Litmus’ State of Email Workflows Report, 87% of marketing leaders say email is critical to their success.

BoyleSports is an Ireland-based bookmaker who takes bets on everything from basketball to darts. With so many different types of users, the BoyleSports team knows that it’s crucial to tailor each email to a specific user. 

“One of our key pillars is personalization,” Neil said. “We find that being personal with customers is best done through email. We can personalize content and promotional messaging to make it look and feel like you’re not one of 50,000 subscribers — you’re one person and this is personal to you, the things you’re betting on, where you are in your life cycle with BoyleSports.”  

Personalization can help ensure strong deliverability. It can take the form of a first name or a more tailored product reference, offer or reminder. The more specific and targeted, the stronger the results. Litmus’s State of Email Workflows Report found that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase after a personalized experience. Not surprisingly, Litmus reported that the top priority for email marketers in the next 12 months is “expanding the use of personalization.”

In Neil’s case, his team is able to segment subscribers into four “parent” segments, further broken down into layered segments along the customer journey. An email that a customer who had placed his first bet on a horse race would look completely different from an email sent to a customer that’s placed multiple soccer bets. Moreover, Litmus enables BoyleSports to do this at scale.

“On average, we send 120 campaigns every week. Eighty of those are automated, and about a third needs a manual build,” Neil shared. With an active base of 750,000 subscribers that BoyleSports markets to, Neil’s team sends more than 9 million emails a year.

“Before Litmus, we had no confidence in what we sent out,” Neil said. “I knew it was imperative for emails to look [good] across devices and providers. It took a long time to develop each email, fix errors, QA, and we only had one template.” Using Litmus has freed the team up to build a variety of templates using various snippets, and A/B test content and copy more frequently. 

Eduardo of Peapod Digital Labs also leans on Litmus for personalization across his grocery brand portfolio to target and engage customers. Retailers leverage personalized data that includes preferred store location and previously purchased items to send weekly ad emails. 

“We use personalization around rewards programs based on purchases,” Eduardo said. “Because points expire, we remind customers what they can use their points towards.” Customers that are more meticulous and considerate of their purchases, such as coupon cutters, seem to enjoy personalized data the most, he said.

What to look for in the QA process

Crafting emails that keep customer preferences top of mind is key to maintaining high engagement, which helps signal that the emails you are sending are not spam. But there are a few other checkpoints to consider when thinking through deliverability:

• Verify your subscribers have explicitly opted-in.
• Follow all applicable spam laws for the countries and regions where your subscribers reside.
• Include company contact information, including a physical mailing address, to avoid spam filters. 
• Check for spelling and grammar errors.
• Include a working and easily visible unsubscribe link.
• Make sure all links in your email are working.
• Check the reputation of your IP addresses and domain names.
• Run a spam filter test to ensure email authentication records are in place.

Beyond personalization, Neil said that one of the things the BoyleSports team discovered in poring over performance data is the amount of time that subscribers spend reading their emails. “A big proportion just glances, so we optimize our hero image to be very minimal and to the point,” he said. And with 80% of subscribers opening their emails up on a mobile device, it made optimization ever more imperative to nail that first view, that glance, instead of expecting customers to scroll for information.

Beyond time spent, Neil and team look at open rates, CTR and actions taken after reading an email, among other engagement signals. On his docket: Directly asking subscribers how often they’d like to hear from BoyleSports. “We want to avoid email fatigue,” Neil said, “so our customers receive no more than three emails in a seven day period, and we prioritize.” But putting that decision in the hands of subscribers themselves can go a long way in ensuring optimal engagement with BoyleSports’s email program. “I want to ask them, ‘How many emails do you want to receive? Are there days on which you prefer to receive them?’ Empowering customers can help strengthen our bond.”

This case study is presented thanks to Litmus, the all-in-one marketing platform that empowers you to build, test, review, and analyze emails more efficiently and effectively than ever so you can get the most out of every send. Optimize and personalize your emails to maximize ROI and create exceptional brand experiences for every subscriber. Learn why 700,000+ professionals across companies of all industries and sizes trust Litmus to make every send count.™