[Litmus](https://litmus.com/) is the gold standard for email testing and analytics, helping more than 250K marketers send amazing emails. Who better to tap for email know-how than Litmus’ own Research Director, [Chad White](https://twitter.com/chadswhite)? Check out his advice on using contextual email, fitting email into your digital strategy and how Litmus uses email marketing.**How does email marketing fit into the larger digital marketing picture?**Email marketing is still the cornerstone of most marketing strategies. That’s because:* Nearly everyone is reachable via email* Email can deliver rich content, even interactive content* Email is one-to-one, enabling the most relevant messaging* Consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email rather than through other channels.Plus, email marketing plays well with other channels. Not only is email awesome when you pull activity from other channels into it, it improves other channels through the subscriber data it generates. As more and more organizations de-silo and better integrate across their marketing channels, email will be even more of a star.**How have you seen email impact your business?**Nothing drives traffic and engagement for Litmus better than email. I suppose that’s not shocking as a provider of email testing, building, and analytics software, but we do invest heavily in social media and organic SEO through our blog. But email drives a ton of activity around our blog, community discussions, product announcements, and events.**When is email data most critical to your efforts: During the planning process; while you’re executing a campaign, so you can change course or allocate more resources; or afterwards, to measure your success?**It’s the most impactful afterwards when we measure success. For us, email is largely an iterative process, so subscriber feedback in terms of metrics helps us to improve our newsletter emails, tweak our strategy around triggered messaging, and update annual campaigns like our The Email Design Conference (TEDC) emails.For instance, last year we embedded a live Twitter feed in our TEDC “Save the Date” email. That email spurred Twitter engagement so well that we won an Email Experience Council award for it. Given that success, we knew we wanted to do something similar this year, but we took it up a notch and upgraded from a text-only Twitter feed to one that enabled images as well.**What do you see as the single most disruptive force coming to the world of email marketing?**It’s the rising expectations of subscribers. Because of a small number of brands that deliver exceptional experiences on on social media, in stores, with other emails, and elsewhere, subscribers are always expecting more from everyone else.That’s most powerfully represented by what we refer to as relevance, but that has a lot of different facets—personalization, timing, interactivity, accessibility, community, and others. It’s on our shoulders as marketers to become more subscriber-centric.**What excites you most about leveraging contextual marketing as a part of your strategy?**The right message to the right person at the right time” has been the goal of marketing for a long, long time. What’s exciting is that we’re really redefining what each of those elements means. Responsive design, dynamic content, and interactive elements are redefining the email content. Profiling, preferences, and segmentation are redefining the audience. And triggered messaging and send time optimization are redefining timing. It’s an exciting time to be an email marketer!_Litmus helps more than 250,000 marketers make email better through its web-based email creation, testing, and analytics platform. Litmus provides instant email previews and quality assurance tools across all major inbox providers, browsers, and devices, and features comprehensive analytics to help users quickly and easily build, test, troubleshoot, and optimize every campaign. Visit [Litmus.com](https://litmus.com/) for more.__Did you know that Movable Ink and Litmus teamed up to make email testing super easy? [Read all about it here](https://movableink.com/blog/litmus-integration/)!_
Innovative Partner Interview: Litmus
