As a digital designer and lover of email, there aren’t many conferences that get me more geek’d than The Email Design Conference (TEDC) by Litmus. Each year they typically select three cities to host the conference in and tickets go faster than a NKOTB reunion tour. For their 2016 conference they had a little fun with the initial announcement email that tickets would be going on sale soon. In their first message about TEDC they announced the first two cities were London and Boston but they were keeping the third city a secret. They asked for subscribers to Tweet their guess using the hashtag #TEDC16, or forward the email to anyone interested, and when they reached 500 shares they would announce the surprise city.
It took all of *2 minutes to reach 500 shares and Litmus subsequently sent a follow-up message making good on their promise and announced that the surprise city would be none other than my favorite city in the world… San Francisco.
Each follow-up message included live tweet updates from people using the #TEDC16 hashtag, as well as an update to the share tracker…which was over 5,000,000 last I checked. (See the email and the live share tracker here.)
Doing the surprise city and making it more interactive for the subscribers I thought was a fantastic idea. Overall the email layout is clean and simple and very easy to follow. In my opinion, Litmus is a model for great email design.
*It actually took 70 minutes due to people using the hashtag to either support or oppose (former) US presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Litmus has since written a concession speech and changed the official event hashtag to #LitmusLive.
For the latest in email design view more of the PostUp creative of the month emails here.
Corey Duncan
Corey serves as PostUp’s Interactive Creative Director, where he manages and designs all creative development for the Professional Services department. He is responsible for designing, implementing and tracking everything from email, web banners, websites, social media and SMS while adhering to digital marketing best practices.