Litmus Live 2021 Speaker: Meet Paul Airy, Email Accessibility Advocate
Have you heard? THE conference for email marketers—Litmus Live—is coming soon to a screen near you. This October 26th-27th, you’ll get how-tos, tips, and advice from marketing leaders and email marketing experts. One of them is Paul Airy.
 | Paul Airy |
Paul’s Litmus Live session will be a case study of how Communisis made it easy for marketers at Nationwide Building Society to create accessible emails.
Let’s find out more about Paul…
What’s your email marketing origin story?
My email story began when I was invited to interview for a web designer role, and whilst in the interview, I was told I was actually being interviewed for an email designer role. I can’t say I was thrilled at the idea. Nevertheless, my enthusiasm won the interviewers over, and I was offered the role and accepted it.
Ten days into it, I found I loved it. And 10 years later, I’m still loving it. This year marks my 10th year in email!
What do you love about email marketing?
There’s three things, really.
Firstly, I love adventure, and email’s always represented uncharted territory, where there’s always opportunities to discover and define.
Secondly, I love design and development, and email’s allowed me to play to my strengths in that regard.
Thirdly, I love making things and making a difference to people’s lives with those things. It’s allowed me to do that, too, especially with accessibility.
What do you find most challenging?
The most challenging part of email is there’s still so much uncharted territory, as the landscape continually changes, and there’s too much of it for one person to know. This is why the email community and email conferences like this are so important, as it enables us all to learn from one another.
Can you give us a sneak peek into your Litmus Live session?
I’ll be talking about accessibility.
My very first session on accessibility was at Litmus Live London in 2015 (The Email Design Conference as it was called back then). In that session, I talked about ways we could make our emails more accessible. At the time, no one was doing so, and I remember being asked afterwards how to get buy-in from organisations.
This session fast forwards us to the present where organisations are now taking note of its importance, but often, don’t know how to implement it. So, my session is a case study of how, as Email Specialist at Communisis, I helped one organisation, Nationwide Building Society, the world’s largest building society, implement accessibility into their emails.
Why should you attend my session? You’ll get insight into how a leading brand had accessibility implemented into its emails. You’ll also get access to some great tips and take-aways to help you implement accessibility into your emails, if you’re not doing so already!
How do you expect email marketing to change in the next few years?
I’ve always been passionate about delivering great email experiences into the inbox, and that will never change. What will change is the data to help us achieve it—the open metric being one example.
However, my hope is that these changes cause us to raise the bar in the email experiences we deliver, so that recipients will really want to receive the emails we create and send to them.
What are you looking forward to the most at Litmus Live?
The privilege of presenting (albeit virtually)!
What’s an email you enjoyed in your own inbox recently and why?
The BBC email promoting the series, Vigil. Why? Firstly, because I love submarine dramas, and it made me want to watch the series—which I did! Secondly, because it’s such a well executed email. The animations make it especially atmospheric.
Magan Le
Magan Le was a Content Marketing Manager at Litmus
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