3rd Party Email Design Tools

Bill Bennett · November 2019

Luminate having minimal built-in editing tools, we've been building our emails in Dreamweaver and pasting the code into Luminate when we're ready to review and send. Pretty primitive way of doing things, especially when it comes to more complicated responsive design, and I'd like to know what others use to get past Luminate's limitations in this regard. For instance I've been looking at Litmus, which has some responsive templates for building emails as well as their other tools for testing and tracking. Still would involve cut-pasting html since it's not integrated with LO (is ANYTHING integrated with LO???) and it's not drag-and-drop, but better than Dreamweaver. Looking for suggestions!

Philip Nawrocki · November 2019

Hey Bill,

I develop with Notepad ++, if something is giving me a particularly hard time I will use Litmus builder. I just use Litmus checklist to make sure my e-mail renders correctly in all e-mail clients.

LO is definitely limited in what it can do in the WYSIWYG, but it will be that way most places if you are doing more complex HTML e-mails. We have Constant Contact and the WYSIWYG is limited there too. I think if you are hand-coding, you are hand-coding.

Too bad Litmus doesn't integrate with LO, that would solve some development time.

Thanks,

Phil

Bill Bennett · November 2019

Thanks Philip, that's helpful.

By way of context: My boss is leaning on me about the tracking tools, too, which is also something Litmus offers, though it looks like there are some issues about bringing them into LO without breaking things. The rudimentary tracking in LO is also a big issue along with design. Thing is, our use of LO is kind of hybridized because we're a public aquarium, and our house list comprises only about 15% donors and members, vs 85% general public who have engaged with us in other ways, by buying tickets, attending events, programs etc. For historical reasons they're all in LO, but we don't actually sync those 85% back with Raisers Edge, just the donors/members. So we're looking at whether it makes sense to keep them in LO as opposed to moving them to a more powerful, dedicated ESP like MailChimp, ConstantC, etc. I've been tasked with figuring out what other people are doing with LO and make sure I'm not missing some solution that would make it worth sticking with it, or should we just bite the bullet and move that chunk of our email marketing elsewhere.

Philip Nawrocki:

Hey Bill,

I develop with Notepad ++, if something is giving me a particularly hard time I will use Litmus builder. I just use Litmus checklist to make sure my e-mail renders correctly in all e-mail clients.

LO is definitely limited in what it can do in the WYSIWYG, but it will be that way most places if you are doing more complex HTML e-mails. We have Constant Contact and the WYSIWYG is limited there too. I think if you are hand-coding, you are hand-coding.

Too bad Litmus doesn't integrate with LO, that would solve some development time.

Thanks,

Phil

Philip Nawrocki · November 2019

Litmus tracking will solve a ton of your problems if you just put it at the very end of your e-mail. We stopped using stationaries for broadcast e-mail sends for this reason.

Luminate tracking isn't terrible, I send the stats from the deliveries tab to our requestors the day after and the week after. On the week after send I provide a link to the Litmus stats.

I hear ya, we don't sync to RE unless the person makes a donation. 100% agree, why flood RE with data it doesn't need.

Luminate is pretty powerful because you can use RE data to help create personalization. We send to donors vs. non-donors and use last gift amount to make giving arrays. This data comes from RE.

Other ESPs you will have to provide that data yourself, so it comes down to how much personalization you want to do.

Plus the automatic interest groups in LO are helpful too.

Happy to chat more about this if you have more questions,

Phil

Bill Bennett · November 2019

Really appreciate your help, Philip. I'd be interested to know more about how you're using Litmus to supplement LO tracking: what kind of information are you getting that isn't available in Luminate? In the case of emails with multiple links, say to blog entries, we'd like to know which stories are drawing the most clicks, as opposed to the single "clck-through" stat that Luminate provides.

Grace Rose Khalsa · November 2019

Bill Bennett:

Really appreciate your help, Philip. I'd be interested to know more about how you're using Litmus to supplement LO tracking: what kind of information are you getting that isn't available in Luminate? In the case of emails with multiple links, say to blog entries, we'd like to know which stories are drawing the most clicks, as opposed to the single "clck-through" stat that Luminate provides.

In LO, Bill, there is a report you can run to get clicks to links within emails, it's the Clickthrough Summary Report (you'd think it would be the Clickthrough DETAILS report, but that actually gives something different). I find this really pretty useful to determine how many clicks on any given link/blurb/story within an email or e-newsletter. We use it in conjunction with Google Analytics (we apply GA tracking links to any email links that go to our main website or any LO event reg or LO donation page, for instance).

Hope this helps,

Gurukarm

Bill Bennett · November 2019

In LO, Bill, there is a report you can run to get clicks to links within emails, it's the Clickthrough Summary Report (you'd think it would be the Clickthrough DETAILS report, but that actually gives something different

Thanks, yes, I was digging deeper after posting my previous and discovered that deeper layer of reports. And yeah, Summary is the right one.

Bill Bennett · November 2019

Been looking at some of the standalone drag-drop design tools. BEEPro and Chamaileon are rated pretty highly in terms of solidity of their code. Wondering if anyone has used those or any other standalone tools.

Philip Nawrocki · November 2019

Litmus gives some quick stats I like. Check out these links about those:
https://litmus.com/help/analytics/engagement-metrics-definitions/
https://litmus.com/help/analytics/category-definitions/

It's very interesting to see the Read, Skimmed or Glanced. The clients obviously help with development.

You could also add Google Analytics tags to your links to track them as well.

Thanks,

Phil

Erik Leaver · November 2019

Bill,

A little trick you can use for tracking links to the same URL in your emails is to use URL shorteners if the link is for an external source. If each shortener is unique, you'll get separate tracking for each. Similarly, you can apply unique source codes for your Luminate links for more refined tracking.

Best,

Erik

Philip Nawrocki · November 2019

Erik Leaver‍ that is not best practice.
https://support.rebrandly.com/hc/en-us/articles/228632488-Blacklisted-URL-Shorteners-Stop-Using-Them-in-Emails-
https://help.returnpath.com/hc/en-us/articles/222483248-What-are-URL-or-Link-Shorteners-and-how-can-they-be-harmful-

LO already encodes it your links for tracking in the platform. You can get the same data in LO, you just need to run a report. Adding GA tags would be a better solution as you could create a report and then just refer to it. Also with GA you can add a parameter to track each link individually.

Campaign Monitor has a good example of this:
https://help.campaignmonitor.com/track-clicked-links-with-google-analytics

Thanks,

Phil

Jeremy Reynolds · November 2019

Anyone ever figure out how to get a Delivery Recipient Report across campaigns instead of doing it one-at-a-time on each delivery stats page? It's an incredible pain trying to get recipient open details when I've split every send up into 10 different deliveries!

Other notes from the peanut gallery:

The results page created from within Email Campaigns will only give you a fraction of the actual details. Go over to reports and download the results, that CSV is packed with goodies.
Use Tasks in LO to put people into a group based on whether they open, click, donate, login, and more. I use em as suppression groups, in queries, etc. Play your cards right and you can get some obscenely good CTRs and open rates.
LO has several systems, each has different access to user data. Email Campaigns can't see TeamRaiser info, for example. And TeamRaiser Coaching Emails can't do autologin or show previews with constituent data.

Some more advanced stuff, not for the faint of heart but very powerful...

Conditionals. Know them, use them, love them.
You can get pretty darn fancy in LO if you add URL variables to your links. U2 is a good one. Sky's the limit if you're an API ninja.
If you can keep them consistent, add utm tags to links and you'll get a wealth of details added to your google analytics campaigns section.
Foundation for Emails is fantastic for developing emails that don't go sideways on Office 2007+ and other problematic clients. I don't use it day-to-day, but I can't imagine making stationary without it.
Bulletproof email html is a nightmare. For consistency and a much more readable editor, I've started using S84 tags to put long snippets of CSS on the FTP.

Bill Bennett · November 2019

Can anyone tell me if there's a way to get email client reports, as opposed to OS, out of LO? Would this require bringing Google Analytics to bear or is that info available out of the box and I'm just not finding it? We're looking at testing new html designs and it would be helpful in focusing our client testing to be able to rank the programs our recipients are actually using,

Philip Nawrocki · November 2019

Bill Bennett‍ not in LO. This is where Litmus comes in. You can get all that in the analytics part of Litmus.

Thanks,

Phil

Sam Johnson 2 · November 2019

We are not currently using it, but an interesting one we have considered is BEE -- particularly their various integration options which are specifically targeted for use cases like LO where you want to add modern functionality to an outdated/legacy WYSIWYG. https://beefree.io/

Bill Bennett · November 2019

Sam Johnson:

We are not currently using it, but an interesting one we have considered is BEE -- particularly their various integration options which are specifically targeted for use cases like LO where you want to add modern functionality to an outdated/legacy WYSIWYG. https://beefree.io/

Thanks, that's one of two that we've been looking at. The other is a newer tool called Chamaileon (not my favorite name). Has a very powerful design interface.

Bill Bennett · November 2019

Litmus tracking will solve a ton of your problems if you just put it at the very end of your e-mail. We stopped using stationaries for broadcast e-mail sends for this reason.

I take it this is because the stationery adds a footer in post-production, preventing the Litmus pixel code from being the last thing before the <./body> tag, is that correct? I know LO will also add an unsubscribe link at the bottom if the email doesn't have one, but I assume that if you include that element in your design template, it shouldn't be a problem.

Philip Nawrocki · November 2019

Right. Even though there is a 'Blank Stationary' in LO, it still adds things to your e-mail. I can't remember now because we created an 'Actually Blank Stationary' so long ago. This way it is truly blank.

You should actually add it after any of your e-mail code. Should be the very last code at the bottom of your document. There are issues if you put in in even before the last </body> tag.

Thanks,

Phil

Bill Bennett · November 2019

Philip Nawrocki:

I can't remember now because we created an 'Actually Blank Stationary' so long ago. This way it is truly blank.

Interesting. The Litmus rep I've been talking to says the main thing is that it's placed below any links you're looking to track, but I would love to know how you went about creating your ACTUALLY blank stationery, as that seems like the safest bet. Was that something you needed a LO developer to do for you in the system?

3rd Party Email Design Tools

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