Litmus design tool: review

By Mark Brownlow, September, 2010 |

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Eccentricity isn't limited to 18th century English aristocrats. The software used to display emails often fails to follow standards too.

In fact, there are no email standards, though one organization is trying to change that.

Each email software client or webmail service has its own idiosyncrasies in the way it interprets the code that makes up an HTML email.

So the same email can look different, depending on whether it's viewed at Hotmail, in Thunderbird or on the iPhone. Outlook 2007 and 2010, lack support for certain design characteristics that Yahoo! Mail, for example, will handle well.

What does this mean for email marketing? Simple: anytime you put together a message or email template, it's important to check that your HTML email displays as you'd like it to...in all the different places it might be seen.

That's an impractical task to do by hand: there are just too many email clients and variations out there. But design preview tools help by taking your HTML email and showing you what it looks like in the most common display environments and configurations.

One of these tools is Litmus. Having reviewed their email analytics product, it's time to see how their design preview tool shapes up.

The concept

The premise behind the tool is very easy. You simply send your email to a test email address provided by Litmus (or upload it online) and the tool returns a set of screenshots that reveal how the email looks, for example, at Gmail or on the iPad.

The details

The user interface is very intuitive and easy-to-use. Once you open an account, you start a test by picking out the display environments you want to examine:

display environments

These include:

The list of 30+ clients covers pretty much all the major options. A nice feature is to have the main webmail services (Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail etc.) available as viewed with two different browsers (IE and Firefox), since browser choice can also influence the display in webmail interfaces.

Once you've made a choice (which you can set as a default for later tests), you either send the email you want to test to a unique address given to you by Litmus, upload the HTML directly or use a generic test email address for your account.

(Sending email to the generic account test address starts a test using your default client selection and means you can initiate such a test without first having to login to your Litmus account.)

It can take a few minutes for the test to then run, but you have the option of getting a notification email, tweet or IM when it's finished: the page also displays a progress bar and minute-by-minute countdown.

As screenshots become available, they appear on the test page as thumbnails you can click on for a fuller view. You can also download them as a zip file or publish the results to a public url for open viewing by others in your team.

I was impressed at how quick the screenshots of my email came up. They were all there within just a couple of minutes. Another nice feature is that the results also include the option to display your email's source code (to help immediately pinpoint what might cause a display problem).

email screenshots

The screenshots

Many of the screenshots allow you to select different views. So you can choose to see the "preview pane only" view or how your email displays when images are suppressed.

So the Outlook 2007 screenshot, for example, actually has four versions:

These options are not always available everywhere. For example, my Hotmail screenshot had no "blocked images" version available. You need to pay attention to the Litmus status box revealing any delays with particular clients or if any clients (or configurations) are currently unavailable for testing.

The screenshots themselves were excellent quality, with the occasional exception. For example:

Despite this, it's very easy to pick up on design issues at particular clients, providing the initial info you need to start the process of researching and solving the problem.

As an example, I was able to pick up on a text/image alignment problem with my double opt-in confirmation email, which was then fixed in seconds.

As all monthly pricing plans involve unlimited tests, a big advantage of the tool is that if something isn't quite right the first time (like the Symbian screenshot) you can just run the test again to doublecheck if it's a problem with your email or with the test itself.

And you can happily test each design tweak one-by-one to work your way round to an optimal solution.

Spam filter test

The screenshots are the meat and drink of the tool but your email also goes through a spam filter test as a little bonus. Litmus tests your email against some of the main spam filters out there (like Postini and SpamAssassin).

The filter tests are one step up from the typical spam testing offered by many ESPs, but not a substitute for a dedicated and comprehensive delivery monitoring solution.

spam filter results

Limitations and scope for improvement

The Litmus tool does what it says on the box and does it well, without making life difficult or complicated for the user.

In terms of improvements, mobile clients will need to evolve to keep pace with rapid changes in that sector. For example, RIM recently announced they would shift to using the WebKit rendering engine for the BlackBerry browser, improving the HTML email-friendliness of those devices enormously.

I would like to see a few cosmetic improvements to the interface...

1. The clients available for testing are grouped into "business" and "consumer" sections. This might lead the unwary user to ignore the one or other group if they have a strong B2B or B2C focus.

However, the distinctions are somewhat arbitrary and, more importantly, many business folk use traditionally "consumer" clients for work. B2B marketers can't afford to ignore "consumer" clients and vice versa.

It might make more sense simply to split the clients into "desktop", "webmail" and "mobile" categories.

2. The client selection menu doesn't show any clients that are temporarily unavailable for testing. I would prefer to see them displayed, but grayed out, so I don't forget to test them later or eventually add them to my default list.

3. When viewing an individual screenshot, it would also be helpful to know which version number is currently being viewed. After a few minutes browsing through screenshots, it's easy to forget whether you'd clicked on email version 4 or email version 5.

4. Finally, on the main test results page, an above-the-fold bookmark to the spam test results that appear below the thumbnails would save idiots like me from wondering where they had got to.

What I'd really love to see is design preview tools like the Litmus application start moving people further along the chain toward design optimization.

Many preview tools would benefit from more content explaining some of the limitations and idiosyncrasies of each client, background information on preview panes and image suppression etc.

Once you found a display problem, it would be nice to have immediate access to information that might explain how you correct it.

That concept might be extended in the future to include an expert system that scans the HTML code and identifies potential issues.

So if the tool finds CSS styling referenced only in an external stylesheet, then it would alert the user that Gmail will ignore that stylesheet and needs inline CSS instead...a kind of "expert validator system" for email designers.

Summary

Notwithstanding the odd bug, Litmus is a great fit if you want to make sure that the crazy email design landscape out there isn't mangling your email unexpectedly.

You're not tied to a minimum contract period, which makes the tool ideal for testing your basic email template at, say, quarterly intervals without having to pay for the intervening months. This kind of basic design check is affordable even for those with small-scale email marketing programs.

However, I would strongly advise any serious email marketer to get into the habit of using the tool before every send. Why?

Disclaimer: I have no business or financial relationship with the team behind Litmus. I did, however, get free 3-month access to their testing and analytics tools for the purpose of this review.

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