Lessons from a Low-Flying Industry

Chris Studabaker | ExactTarget

The world's largest assembly of email designers begins with a celebration and hard look at the power and challenges of a young profession. Though barely a decade old, it's time to cast a constructive and critical eye on a craft rife with both innovation and apologetics. The conference begins with key lessons for defining our jobs, improving ourselves, and embracing the title of Email Designer.

How Customer-Centricity is Changing Email

Colin Nederkoorn | Customer.io

How are the savviest marketers building strong relationships with people today? How will you make sure your emails delight people in the future? We'll take a look at several important trends enabling you to delight customers with more targeted and more relevant emails.

Building an Audience with Video and Email

Brendan Schwartz | Wistia

Video is the most emotional medium there is. And it's no secret that email is an amazing way to build an engaged audience. Combine these two things and it's like your business has a superpower. I'm planning to go through how we got started with video in email, the design decisions and tech behind it, and how it's helped us and how we measure its success.

Not Your Usual Mobile Email Talk

Elliot Ross | Action Rocket
Justine Jordan | Litmus

You already know all the stats about mobile email opens (you’re at a Litmus conference after all) so let’s get straight to the dirty work and talk about what you should do about it. Whether you have just a half hour or three full days, there are tactics you can embrace to make your emails awesome on mobile. We’ll cover common pitfalls, easy wins and a comprehensive “crawl, walk, run” strategy to help convince your boss (or client) that the brave new world of mobile email is worthwhile to tackle.

Email Experimentation at Twitter-Scale

Swapnil Jain | Twitter

Twitter runs hundreds of A/B tests on small fractions of it's user base, especially on the emails it sends. Learn why you should experiment, what's the process, how do you interpret the results and how do you measure success with plenty of examples from Twitter emails!

What's Pushing Email Design Forward Today?

Ros Hodgekiss | Campaign Monitor

While email is often typecast as an antiquated tool by the press and social media pundits, the email marketing scene has never been more active. Big and small brands alike are banging on the doors of email experts to create designs that are optimized for mobile devices. Email-led startups are gaining mainstream popularity. So, what's pushing this rush to make email beautiful, not to mention everyone's channel of choice?

In this session, we'll be covering:

• Ubiquity rules: The state of email design today
• Why brands have recognized the value in quality email design
• How design-led companies have broken email's old rules
• Responsive email: Why mobile-first is the new mantra

Data For Designers

Kristina Huffman | ExactTarget
Schuyler Wareham | ExactTarget

We'd all love a data scientist on our team, but the reality is that designers, coders and marketers have to make data-driven decisions about their email campaigns. We'll walk you through how email creators can gather data, analyze it, and sell your ideas through data visualization. We'll show some of our client success stories and lessons we've learned along the way that focus on narrowing the gap between mobile and desktop engagement.

Restoring Your Faith In Email: The BuzzFeed Newsletter Strategy

Dan Oshinsky | BuzzFeed

At BuzzFeed, we're focused on telling stories that people want to share. But lost among the social giants — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest — is email. At a time when so many look to their inboxes with dread, we started asking the question: How do you get people excited about email?

We started from scratch, looking to merge great email design with content that felt BuzzFeed-y. The result has been a newsletter program that's continued to grow — and delight subscribers.

First Comes Love, Then Comes Mobile

Matt Byrd | WeddingWire

Engaged couples are planning their weddings on-the-go more often than not. As a result, 65% of WeddingWire's emails are opened on mobile devices. To best reach such highly mobile subscribers, WeddingWire has successfully implemented a mobile-first email strategy, featuring completely responsive emails that look pretty darn good on just about any screen size. In this session, Matt will share the strategies and tactics used to mobile optimize WeddingWire's entire email marketing program and boost their click-through rates by as much as 38%.

Adapting to a Multi-Device World: A Utility Company's Perspective

Brian Graves | DEG
Brent Walter | DEG

How do you adapt email strategy and design to perform in the new multi-device landscape? This case study of Portland General Electric will take a look at the challenges presented by PGE’s highly mobile customer base and how creating simplified, responsive templates led to improved engagement, not just on mobile, but across the board.

We’ll cover:

• Strategy - PGE’s audience and modeling content and strategy around mobile friendly design
• Design - A dive into the design methods and patterns used to make PGE’s campaigns user friendly regardless of device
• Results - A deeper look at how the redesign has performed, including increased engagement on mobile & desktop
• Looking Forward - How can multi-device engagement be improved in the future? A look at where we see multi-device engagement heading in the coming future.

Soapbox Session

Need to get something off your chest? Get on our soapbox! Sign up for a 5-minute slot in our lunchtime "soapbox sessions," a time for you rant about WYSIWYG editors, or pitch your #TEDC14 session topic. The audience is captive, and the mic is yours!

How to Optimize Your Email Workflow

Brian Graves | DEG
Keith Frankel | HubSpot
Dan Murphy | Netted

Our panel of experts will share their top tips for maximizing productivity, setting client expectations, executing creative briefs, building flexible and robust template systems, and making sure your production process stays on-track.

Live Email Optimization

Justine Jordan | Litmus

Submit your email for live review during our interactive working sessions! Get A/B testing suggestions, quick wins, optimization tips and other advice in exchange for sharing your email with fellow attendees. Don't miss this opportunity to critique and be critiqued!

Damn It Feels Good to be an Email Designer

Elliot Ross | Action Rocket

After two days of nothing but love for email we'll wrap up with a bulletproof call to action. It's time to stand up to the suits and the stooges, and while the web designers are distracted by shiny toys, we'll show the rest of the world what they can learn from email.