Agile Email Marketing Part 2: Micro-Efficiencies to Streamline Reviews, Approvals, and Testing

An agile email marketing process helps you create better emails, faster so you stay timely, relevant, and ahead of the competition. After all, you want to be near the top of the inbox, not buried in it.

In our first post about agile email marketing, we talked about the content and development micro-efficiencies to help you become agile. But it doesn’t stop there. According to Litmus’ 2019 State of Email Workflows, marketers spend an average of 4.21 hours on reviews and approvals and another 2.38 hours testing and troubleshooting. This is for one email.

We know change is hard, but…

Fortunately, there are small steps—what we call micro-efficiencies—you can take to trim down the time spent on reviews, approvals, and testing.

Micro-efficiency #4: Collect feedback and collaborate in one place

One of the not-so-fun things about the review process? Feedback can come from different people and from different places. So if one piece of feedback contradicts another, who do you listen to? And, uh, hopefully you didn’t miss someone’s comment among the various tools you’re juggling. Oops.

So this small time-saver is too easy not to do: Consolidate everyone’s feedback, collaborate more effectively, and get approvals all in one place. Stop sending screenshots or individual test emails.

The ultimate way to simplify collaboration is with the all-in-one Litmus Proof. Not only do you get desktop, mobile, and plaintext views on a single page but you also get the ability to leave comments directly on the email and record approvals. Folder sharing makes it easy to review multi-email campaigns or dynamic content versions, and our integrations with Trello and Slack keep you on top of things so you can take action faster. After you get feedback, you can just click over to Litmus Builder to easily make changes. No hopping between tools!

Micro-efficiency #5: Automate testing

Ahh, the final preparations for your email send. But wait, are you forgetting something? Don’t let anything fall through the cracks. Free up your brain space, and save yourself the time of sending a bunch of test emails.

Automate your final checks and testing in just a few quick clicks with Litmus Checklist. In one place, you’ll be guided through an automated check of:

• Email previews: Make sure your email displays perfectly across popular email clients.
• First impressions: Ensure your subject line, preview text, from name, and reply-to will get your email opened.
• Accessibility: Instantly see (and hear) whether your email is accessible for all your subscribers, and get actionable advice on how you can make your emails more inclusive.
• Links: See that they’re working and going to the right place.
• Tracking: Verify that your click-throughs are being tracked by Litmus, your ESP, and/or Google Analytics.
• Image blocking: Preview your email with images turned off to ensure your email is legible and actionable in all circumstances.
• Loading speed: Identify images that are broken, take too long to load, or have excessive file sizes which could impact performance.
• Spam Testing: Identify issues that could impact deliverability before you send.

And remember, you can easily make changes to fix any issues you might find by clicking back over to Litmus Builder.

Wasn’t that quick and painless? Now you’re ready to hit send and analyze email performance, which sounds easy enough. But even that can be better streamlined, too. Check out our micro-efficiencies to send and analyze emails.

We’d love to hear about your own micro-efficiencies. How have you become more agile? How has Litmus helped?

Want to see all of the micro-efficiencies plus bonus tips & tricks?

Our ebook, Going Agile: The New Email Workflow, is now available! It includes a detailed agile email workflow process chart you can easily reference, all seven of our micro-efficiency tips, plus bonus ways you can go the extra mile toward agile email marketing.

Get your copy →