The Email Community is Collaborating: How You Can Get Involved

We at Litmus have some great news to share with the email marketing community. Email standards are becoming a real thing courtesy of a new community of industry professionals, the Email Markup Consortium (EMC). And we are here for it! 👏 

Whether you’re an email designer, email developer, or email marketer, the lack of email standards can quickly derail your efforts. This not only creates more work for your team, but sets murky goals and expectations. However, the EMC is bringing the email community together to help create consistency and collaboration—which is a huge win for all.  

To help you better understand the EMC, and what it means for you, we have broken down the details. 

What is the Email Markup Consortium (EMC)?

The EMC is “working to improve the user experience, accessibility, performance, consistency, and reliability of email markup.”

Led by Hussein Al Hammad, Mark Robbins, and Alice Li, the group aims to work with developers, email tools, and email clients to drive the EMC’s vision forward at every step of the email journey.

The EMC  is a community-led, collaborative group comprised of email developers, designers, and marketers. They aim to improve the email marketing experience for everyone regardless of the recipient’s device, email client, assistive technology, or internet speed.

EMC community members share the common goals of improving email:

• User experience
• Accessibility
• Performance
• Consistency
• Reliability
• Deliverability

Since there have long been inconsistencies in developing this type of community, the EMC is working closely with members to create agreed-upon approaches to save everyone time, effort, and budget while delivering better email results to subscribers.

“Where previous projects like this may not have quite worked, there’s more recent evidence of collaboration between vendors that gives me hope that we could soon have a set of email markup standards.

For example, BIMI—that’s been a collaborative project between ISPs and vendors in the email space. Dreaming about the day that email developers won’t have to spend their days fixing bugs and creating coding workarounds for all the email clients they have to support but are instead able to push the boundaries of email with standards in place to help them.”

—Jaina Mistry, Director of Email Marketing at Litmus

How to join the EMC

The EMC requires contributions and collaboration from people who come from all aspects of email marketing to be effective. You can apply as an individual member or request a corporate membership. If you aren’t ready to apply formally, you can join an existing discussion or open an issue like you would on any open source project.

The good news? There is no set requirement for involvement. You’ll still have access to the information provided by the community regardless of if you contribute.  

Why we at Litmus are excited about the EMC

Forming a community with resources to standardize email is good for all! Making email better helps developers, designers, and marketers—as well as subscribers—and will work to ensure audiences get a better experience, and brands get more value out of every message sent.

“We are excited that the EMC is taking the initiative to get people in the email community talking. I think having one centralized resource hub is a good way to bring unity. It’s cool to see how fast everything is progressing.”

—Carin Slater, Email Marketing Specialist at Litmus

At Litmus, we are excited about the potential for our clients, and ourselves, to be able to refine our approach and streamline processes. Having a clear roadmap of expectations, narrowing down email clients, and better unifying developers and designers will help unite the email community, and allow us to all learn from each other.

The EMC is open to anyone in the email community. The more people who participate, the better the outcome for all. Support from all perspectives will only increase its success.

This is a chance to be heard and make email better for everyone.

Get in the email loop and start contributing to the future of email by becoming an EMC member today.

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