How the Litmus Team Uses Email Guardian (and You Can Too!)

What a beautiful email. Designed with Dark Mode and accessibility in mind. Coded to work as seamlessly as possible in every inbox. You even got it approved by all stakeholders in no time. You hit send, and then…

The primary call-to-action link is broken. And you sent it out to a sizable segment.

As an email marketing team who markets to email marketers, we understand the importance of delivering effective emails because email marketers (we’re talking about ourselves here, too!) have incredibly high standards when it comes to the emails that land in their inbox.

Sure, email clients don’t make it easy with over 300,000 potential email renderings and email client updates that can happen on average every 1.2 days. But we’re up for that challenge at Litmus.

Here are some of the ways we keep our cool while working to create email magic—thanks in large part to our email “safety net”, Email Guardian.

How we stay on top of 120+ emails and email templates

Just like us, you’re juggling a million things: how to meet your email marketing goals, setting up email automations, and managing a massive library of email design templates.

So, how does the Litmus team keep tabs on how their critical emails and email templates display—without losing our heads?

Every quarter, we test every single email template in our Litmus Design Library using Previews & QA to ensure there are no critical issues. Our focus here is to ensure that every single email and email template still displays (or renders) as expected in every email client and device and that our emails work as subscribers expect them to.

While this quarterly task is invaluable in helping us maintain our email templates, it doesn’t help us react quickly to unexpected and ad hoc email updates and changes.

Litmus Email Guardian does. 

By ensuring every email and email template is monitored by Email Guardian, we no longer have to worry about unexpected changes that impact our emails. Litmus Email Guardian helps us protect our emails and ensure our subscribers have the best possible experience of Litmus in their inbox.

Plus, the Email Guardian Dashboard makes it easy to assess the comprehensive impact of Email Guardian’s monitoring efforts. We consider this our one-stop shop to:

• 🔍 Track everything easily. Monitor multiple emails faster.
• 📊 More control. Set and adjust monitoring end dates.
• 🤝 Better collaboration. Add notes when unenrolling emails.
• 📩 Staying informed. Configure monitoring email alerts by email.
• 📝 Improved documentation. Access a more complete, robust history.

Where does Litmus Email Guardian fit in the email workflow?

While the email workflow our team has adopted is well-defined, it’s flexible enough to be able to adapt when new technology is available which can help us be more efficient. It’s our opinion that email workflows should be continually reviewed and updated to best support the changing needs of the team.

We use Litmus throughout the email workflow, from building to QA—and even proofing. Rather than starting to monitor an email using Email Guardian when an email is first created, we’ve chosen to add newly created emails and email templates to Email Guardian after the email has been proofed and approved.

At this point in the email workflow, the email is fully QA’d and proofed by all stakeholders, meaning it’ll be the version of the email we’ll be sending and what our subscribers will receive.

This helps ensure Email Guardian isn’t monitoring an email that’s a work-in-progress—as you know, emails aren’t always built, QA’d, and proofed in a single day.

It’s easy to add this step to our workflow because it’s literally a single button press within our Previews & QA checklist!

And with that single click, we have collective peace of mind that if email clients were to update unexpectedly and impact how emails are displayed, Email Guardian is keeping a watchful eye on our emails—and if something does change, we’ll be notified.

What if we have multiple emails that need monitoring? It’s as easy as going down the list and toggling on monitoring.

Set it—and forget it. Yes, really

This might be a first. A “set it and forget it” opportunity in email?

Using Email Guardian is probably the only part of email marketing you can set and forget.

This is primarily because we can monitor an unlimited number of emails—and we have a lot of emails and email templates to keep an eye on! Plus, using Email Guardian doesn’t eat into monthly preview allowances. That’s called winning!

Once Email Guardian is monitoring our emails, when a change is detected, we’re notified of that email preview change via email. From that email, it’s a single click to see exactly what’s changed with a swishy before-and-after slider!

From there, we’ll review the change detected. If it will impact upcoming email campaigns, we’ll prioritize updating the email to fix the issue detected.

We’re not the only ones taking advantage of Email Guardian’s ability to give email marketers peace of mind:

Emails that lead to a dead end are in the past. With Email Guardian, your emails won’t just look good—it’ll also help ensure you’re not leading subscribers to broken links or to links that load slowly.

Once a broken link is detected, we’ll review and update the link accordingly based on Email Guardian’s recommendation.

You can steal from us, we won’t mind. Take these steps, and goodbye to broken links—for good.

Embracing emerging technologies

Your email workflow isn’t—and should never be—static. If it were to remain static, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to adapt it to new technologies that can help make your email workflow more efficient.

Incorporating Email Guardian into our email workflows has:

• Given us more visibility into how our emails render—without any extra work
• Helped us keep a watchful eye on our enormous library of emails and templates
• Empowered us to feel prepared for when email clients make unexpected changes