You haven’t been receiving articles I’m proud of in recent months. The quality of my writing has gone down. I’m sorry.

But I’m working hard to fix it. One idea I’ve had is to hire a pro. Someone smarter and more talented than me to write articles for you. I’ve been nervous about trusting someone else to do it. So I wanted to learn from an someone who has been successful at letting another person write for them.

Many of you have told me that you’re in a similar position. You just don’t have the time. Or you’re struggling to think of what to write. A freelance writer may be the answer.

Creating quality content on a consistent basis is the key to generating sustainable growth through content marketing.

Ruben Gamez is a master at working with freelancers to write articles for the Bidsketch blog. In this short interview we talk about things like:

• How to find great people to write for you
• How much to pay
• How to evaluate writers
• How to manage freelance writers working for you

If you’re struggling to create quality content on a regular basis (like I am), this deep dive will be a beacon of light. We’ll look at the strategies Ruben uses on his blog and how he works with freelance writers to get quality content on his blog multiple times per week and drives predictable growth to his business.

(transcript is after the break)

Colin: I’m here today with Ruben Gamez, the founder of Bidsketch. And so Ruben, you and I met at…I think the first time at LessConf and then we…we met again recently at Bacon Biz Conf. I’ve always enjoyed our conversations about fast businesses, about content marketing and all of that type of stuff. So, I was excited to get the opportunity to chat with you about working with freelancers to do content marketing, which is the subject of our chat today. But first up, for people who don’t know you and maybe don’t know Bidsketch, what is Bidsketch and what can you tell folks about that?

Ruben: Sure. Well first, just thanks for inviting me to do this. This is pretty cool. Bidsketch is proposal software basically for freelancers, consultants, and agencies. They just use it to create…they create online proposals for their clients but we do have a lot of customers that also print those out to PDF and send them as well.

Colin: Cool. And how do people find out about Bidsketch? How do they discover your business?
Ruben: So, right now the two biggest sources of like leads and customers are SEO and content marketing. So, in content marketing. Yeah, it’s really been working for us lately and I say lately because I looked at. Just a few days ago I was looking Google’s Analytics and I was looking at the stats for a year ago like you know versus last month, right? And about a year ago, we were getting about something like 17,000 uniques…

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: …a month. In like last month, lately it’s been about 50,000 uniques around. So most of that traffic is blog traffic and that’s helped like over the last year, double our paid customers like every month that we get.

Colin: Fantastic. And so. So, you mentioned SEO. You mentioned content marketing. I mean those things feel kind of related. How does SEO influence the content marketing side of things and vice versa? Do you pick a keyword and write for that or do you write some interesting content and figure out where the keywords go in that?

Ruben: So, they…they…definitely are related and they work together, right? Like, the three biggest. The three main things that work together are the e-mail lists …

Colin: Right.

Ruben: SEO focusing on certain keywords and then you know the blog, right, the content on there.

Colin: Hmm.

Ruben: So in the early days, the strategy was different than what it is now when it comes to SEO and the blog. So in the early days, it was very much about doing the…using the Google keyword tool to see what terms our customers or potential customers might be searching for, right? So maybe they’re searching…in about…like…they want to know about writing a web design proposal, right?

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: So they type in “how to write web design proposal” or they type in something like “how to charge for web design” or things like that. A lot of “how to” posts. And that was great for bringing in that early traffic because we didn’t have an audience. We didn’t have a list.

Colin: Hmm.

Ruben: So, that just made it really easy for us to get targeted traffic to this post and then get those people on the list.

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: Nowadays, we…we’re not so focused on SEO that way. We’re a little bit more broad. We do focus on certain keywords. We’ll actually go back and change some of the existing content, so right now the content and the titles and everything like that…it’s completely focused on making it shareable content, right, so that people retreat it and all that stuff, right? And then we’ll actually go back and then kind of change the titles of the posts to focus on certain keywords.

Colin: Interesting. So, you publish it initially as shareable and then later tweak the titles?

Ruben: Yeah. Yeah. Not all of them. Some. On a few. Basically, we’ll go through and do a little bit of researching and see if there’s something key there. We also have a few posts. We have several posts that have done pretty well to where we did actually, from the beginning, focus on specific keywords, right? Like freelance marketing is one of them that does pretty well. That was originally written with that in mind and but it’s also highly shareable.

Colin: Cool. So how often do you write? How often is there a new post on the blog?

Ruben: So, generally…try to have a new post about once or twice a week.

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: Twice a week is the target. Lately it’s been one time a week. Originally it was like one post every two weeks and slowly because every post gets e-mailed out to the list so I’ve not been very comfortable with e-mailing people more frequently, right? I had to get a little bit comfortable with like e-mailing them weekly and then even two times a week felt like a big…like a big move to me, right? So, I just. Well, okay let’s test this out, right? Instead of just assuming that people were going to hate it or it’s too much e-mail and testing it out meant that we got a lot more traffic, a lot more we actually. Every time I send out e-mails I get customers, right?

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: So we got more customers, more traffic. I tried out three, even, a week a couple times and I didn’t see. I didn’t see the impact that I saw from going. From going from one to two that I did, you know, when I did from two to three.

Colin: Did you get resistance from people? Did people e-mail you saying, “Hey, you’re e-mailing too much,” or anything like that?

Ruben: No, I’ve never gotten an e-mail that…from somebody saying that I’m e-mailing too much.

Colin: Okay.

Ruben: The only e-mails that I get about that, you know, anything promoting content is basically that they really like the e-mails.

Colin: Cool.

Ruben: That they really like the content. That’s it.

Colin: And so you’re sending. You’re writing like one to…one to two times a week. How often are you, Ruben, writing those posts?

Ruben: Oh, I’m not. I’m not writing any of them. It’s…it’s just way too time consuming. I used to write the posts in the early days, but it would take so long and just. I’m a slow writer and I don’t like doing it, so I don’t write any of the content. I just hire…hire people to do that.

Colin: Gotcha. And so how many like. So, in the early days you’re talking like a year ago or so or two years…two years ago and when did you start kind of…

Ruben: No. It’s like 3 ½ years ago.

Colin: So, 3 ½ years ago is when you started writing and then realized that you…you’re not the right person to be doing it? Your time is better maybe spent elsewhere and…

Ruben: Right.

Colin: So, how many different freelancers have you worked with over…over that time?

Ruben: A lot. So, way back in the beginning I was writing a lot of the content but then there was a period of time where nothing really was going on in the blog, right?

Colin: Hmm.

Ruben: So it was like a year maybe a year and a half like maybe just updates about the product, but you know which nowadays just thinking about it makes me cringe but there was not much going on and then there was a point where I said, “Okay, we need to get more traffic and this was working relatively well. Let’s do it again, but this time I don’t want to do all of the writing myself,” right?

Colin: Yeah.

Ruben: So, that’s how I started that and I started looking for…looking for…for writers at that point. I worked with, I don’t know. Like right now, I work with about five writers regularly?

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: And I’ve hired, I don’t, 15, 20 more than that been or time tested them out.

Colin: So, how did you go about finding those people?

Ruben: The two best ways that have worked for me have been to actually just look at blogs that have great content and the type of content that you know that I want that’s also focused on my industry, on my customers and see which writers I like the best and pitch them, basically, to mean I’ll see if they’ll write for the blog. That works and I’ve, like, found a couple of writers that I work with regularly that way but it’s so time consuming and you get a lot of “nos”, right? If they’re really good. If they’re really good, you’ll get a lot of “nos”. And then sometimes too, depending on the blog, you have to be careful because sometimes blogs like Copy Blogger or I don’t know Pro Blogger, they do a lot of editing, so you’re not going to get the type of post that you think you’ll be getting.

Colin: Interesting.

Ruben: Right? Because I don’t want to do any of it. So, I want the post to be you know great right from the beginning without me getting involved at all.

Colin: Right.

Ruben: So that’s one way. The other way is then to actually through…go through referrals.

Colin: Right.

Ruben: …asking people who know great writers. And a good example of this is, I hired a writer who runs a content marketing podcast to come up with a list of I think it was 20 recommend writers. So, I told them about my market like what I was looking for and all this and it’s a way of short cutting…short cutting, right?

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: And he just came back with a list of 20 writers. I paid him for it. It’s not what he normally does but there are a lot of people like that, right? That know more about like certain industries basically especially when it comes to content marketing that maybe you can hire like that.

Colin: Right. And so let’s say you found one of these people through a creative way like that.

Ruben: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Colin: What’s the process you go through with them before a post that they write for you at Bidsketch blog?

Ruben: So I have a…I forget what I call it…but it’s like a customer profile document.

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: Basically, it just lists the target customers, what industries they tend to work for you know. It’s like a two-page document with a…and it’s not like very wordy or anything like that we’re talking bold lists, big fonts and stuff like that but really media important stuff, right? Like, what are their biggest fears, what do they usually struggle with—basically just a document that tells them all about the target customers and the blog readers…

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: so that they know who they’re writing for and then there’s a list of recommended…recommended topics…

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: Right? So we’re talking about like it’s pretty broad nowadays. It’s just sales and marketing for freelancers, consultants and agencies.

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: And that’s how broad.

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: So, that’s what they get before them. I say, “Ok, we want the post to be about, anywhere from…at the minimum over 1,000 words…generally about 1,500 words or so.”

Colin: Hmm.

Ruben: So, longer media posts with lots of examples. I’ll give a couple of example posts.

Colin: Yeah. How…how did you arrive at that…at that length because that’s…I mean it…a 1,000-1,500 words is…is…you know that’s a longer post. You see a lot of like very short, short posts out there.

Ruben: Right. Right.

Colin: Is that? You found that the longer media posts get the best results for you guys?

Ruben: Yeah, try to also to different posts and it’s interesting when I try and hire a lot of writers like going on the pro blogger words and stuff like that and having them submit you know their post to me. I’ve never had a lot of luck that way but a lot of those writers are used to charging and writing around like let’s say 500 words or something like that, right? 500 or 800.

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: Under 1,000. And that just hasn’t really done very well on our blog. Plus, I’ve looked at a lot of the other blogs that are…that really like…they’re doing really great on content marketing like the Kiss Matrix blog

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: …or smashing…smashing magazine blog and they have just really meaty write posts. So, it’s just looking at what sort of content our potential customers or blog readers really like and it just tends to be super meaty stuff.

Colin: Hmm…that’s really…that’s really interesting. Cool. And so the topics that people are writing about or like the you know…do you usually write headlines for people or do you give people ideas when they’re writing that post for you?

Ruben: No. No. They have to. So, the writers that I hire are very experienced. If you go to their blog, they you know every single post gets a ton of retweets, a ton of comments and stuff like that. So, they have an audience. They know how to write great headlines and stuff like that. So, that’s the point. I don’t want to get involved in any of that, right? Because it takes time. It really takes a lot of time.

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: Especially writing a great you know post title or headline. In the…before them I went through a period where I was hiring…I was just experimenting and hiring writers where this is… this is… really…a great writer and yes they might have been a good writer but they just didn’t write in that…the style that I needed which meant that I would have to go in there and I had to tweak the title, edit the post and every single time. It was just too much work.

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. Cool. And so if you’ve got this post…you want…you’re trialing out a new person and…how do you…presumably you read through it the first time before publishing…

Ruben: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Colin: that…that first post and let’s say…so let’s say it’s okay and you publish it. How do you kind of evaluate them after that? Is it like they satisfied Ruben so that’s good enough to go on the blog or do you kind of look at…look at their metrics versus other peoples’ metrics…are you going to that level?

Ruben: Yeah. I’m basically looking at the amount of like comments and shares that a post gets but it’s tough in the beginning because you’ll always…like even if you have somebody who’s great…can consistently can deliver posts that get a lot of comments and shares, they’ll have posts at that just don’t do as well, right?

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: And that happens so you need…I need a few posts before I can tell whether or not, you know, we should continue working together. And yeah generally…they’ll…if I find somebody that is already doing it on their blog; they’re going to be good enough. They’ll deliver what I need.

Colin: And…and when you’re talking about paying for them to do articles for you, how do you…how do you do it? Do you do per article…per hour? What has worked best for you?

Ruben: So, I actually pay you mostly per post but I pay per hour. I still pay per hour for one of the writers so I’m open to paying any which way. It doesn’t really matter to me but most writers do seem to like to charge per post.

Colin: Gotcha. And if you’re working with good writers which sounds like you guys really are. How much should someone expect to pay per post for the blog?

Ruben: So, generally I like to stay around the $200 a post area. That’s like I was experimenting in earlier days with people that like I was paying $50 or $80 a post and then it wasn’t really until I got to the hundred you know like to the 100-150 that I got better quality and longer posts but that’s a different type of blogger that I’m getting better than what I’m working with now which is like the $200 you know 250…

Colin: Gotcha.

Ruben: …$250 range.

Colin: When I’m thinking to myself about how long it takes me to write an article, if I could get someone to write an article for $200 that’s a huge time savings for me.

Ruben: Oh yeah!

Colin: And I could devote that time to other things. So…

Ruben: Right, right. Like if it took me 8 hours or how many hours to write a post, right?

Colin: Wow.

Ruben: That’s a lot of time saved.

Colin: Yeah.

Ruben: Plus, like the amount of money that I’m spending a month on these posts, I make back within that first month, right? And since the product is a fast product means that every other month after that those new customers is just profit.

Colin: Gotcha. Yeah, just thinking about the economics, it sounds like a pretty good investment. If you’re going to get let’s say 1 or 2 people signing up per post you’re going to make that back.

Ruben: Yeah, yeah. The only thing is that it’s working this way now because I’m using a larger list as well so the strategy like is different when you have a larger list versus you don’t. So, if I had the exact writers and it was way back in the early days where I didn’t have a large list, I would not be making my money back so quickly, right? I’d be spending more money on. I’d probably be doing less posts on the blog…

Colin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ruben: …like 2 or 3 a month and I’d be spending more on having people do guest posting for me.

Colin: Gotcha.

Ruben: to get new traffic. So, I do that now but I do less of that.

Colin: Interesting. Yeah and it sounds like the having that list where you can publish your content, get it out on the blog and then let people know about it, it’s a pretty key…

Ruben: Right.

Colin: … key part of the strategy.

Ruben: Right. Yeah. Basically.

Colin: Awesome. Well, this has been tremendously interesting. Do you…can you share any advice for maybe people who are writing or struggling to get their content out of the door right now and they’re considering hiring a freelancer to help. Any other advice for those folks?

Ruben: Sure. Yeah, I mean. I definitely would hire a freelancer. I know that it takes time. It takes practice. So, at the beginning you might not be so good at it. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work you know so like you should quit you know it happens to a lot of people when they’re outsourcing anything whether it’s government writing or whatever.

Ruben: It takes a little time to get good at but also try and find people, like I mentioned, that are already doing what you need.

Ruben: Right?

Colin: Right.

Ruben: And don’t just depend on them. So, if they’re that good ask them for advice, right? Don’t try to micro-manage them, try to make them fit because you know I [inaudible 00:20:52] whatever that you’re seeing but you know give them a lot of freedom and ask them for advice on how to grow your blog.

Colin: Cool. Well thanks so much Ruben. Really, really appreciate this talk on how to hire a freelancer to do your content marketing so thank so much for taking the time to chat with me.

Ruben: No problem. It was fun. Thanks.

Yesterday I spoke with Justine Jordan. Justine is the Marketing Director at Litmus.com, a product that allows you to test email designs across all the clients you could imagine as well as providing spam testing and a whole host of other services.

The interview covers some topics I hope you’ll find valuable like:

• How should a new company approach setting up their email program?
• Some insight Litmus’ marketing strategy.
• How to think about responsive designs and mobile when designing your emails.

You’re really going to enjoy all the wisdom Justine has to share.

Watch the full interview below:

Show Notes

• Mobile First (2009)
• Litmus’ awesomely designed newsletter
• Email Design Conference in London, San Francisco and Boston
• Follow Justine Jordan on twitter

Full transcript

Colin Nederkoorn: Hey everybody, I am here with Justine Jordan. She’s the Director of Marketing at Litmus.com. Justine, I’d love to hear a little bit about what Litmus is.

Justine Jordan: Sure. Litmus is a small software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We build software to help email marketers make their emails better. We do some rendering testing. We take screenshots of what your emails look like in a variety of different email clients and mobile devices. We also offer a spam filter test, so you can see if you’re going to hit any spam filters before you send, and then, we also offer an analytics service that lets you know where people are opening your emails, how long people read them, and if they printed and forwarded, so some cool behavioral data around email too.

Colin: Cool. Your role there, you’re the Director of Marketing. What does that entail? How many people are on the team with you? Tell us a little bit about that.

Justine: Sure. I frequently make the joke that my job is whatever needs to get done that day. I’m sure a lot of you can relate; as a small business, a lot of us wear a lot of hats. I joined the Litmus team almost three years ago, and I was the first official marketing hire that the company ever had. For a while, probably about a year and a half, I was a one woman show. I did everything from writing blog posts to helping handle customer support issues, to jumping on demos when prospective customers asked for them, to writing and designing and coding emails; basically just like I said, [Indecipherable 1:45] , so I guess “marketing” is a really broad term in the Litmus universe.
Today, we have three people. We have myself. We have a Marketing Coordinator named Lauren, and then a brand new hire who I’m very, very excited about named Kevin, a Content Designer, that’s helped ease the design load here in the marketing team at Litmus.

Colin: Your background is actually more design than marketing, is that correct?

Justine: Absolutely. I have a BFA, a Bachelor of Fine Arts. I went to an art school in Indianapolis, Indiana. My passion, or my dream, was to become a brand manager one day. I spent my first year out of school designing brochures and other things that you print and physically hand to people, before I found a job doing mail design. It was there that I really fell in love with this idea of a designer being able to be so connected to their audience, and getting immediate feedback on their designs. I’ve never truly been that creative of a person, so I always felt like kind of a fake as a designer.
I really liked email marketing because it let me flex my analytical, rational, logical muscle, while also still being creative.

Colin: When you think about the marketing strategy for Litmus, what are the different pieces that you guys have in place? What are the different ways that you reach your audience?

Justine: Strangely enough, email isn’t one of the primary methods, although it is one of the ones that drives the most traffic. As all [Indecipherable 3:31] startups can probably relate, it’s really hard to make good email with a small team, so we really focus on quality over quantity, although we’re hoping to change that.
I think a lot of people are surprised when they hear that our marketing maybe isn’t as sophisticated as they assumed it was. [laughs] Again, I definitely think we take the quality over quantity approach. Email is definitely a huge driver of traffic to our website, which is a primary indicator of making sales and money, which is a good thing.
But Twitter is really big for us, and social media in general. I’m really surprised every day, looking at Google Analytics, the number of visitors that Facebook drives our way. We primarily spend a lot of our time blogging and creating content for the blog. All that content on the blog goes into our newsletter, and then to Tweets and Facebook posts, and all those things are intended to drive traffic back to our site.
It’s a pretty simple model, but it’s been working really well for us.

Colin: Hey folks, at this point we had a brief interruption in our Internet connection, so we jump back into the interview a few minutes later. Let me see, where were we?

Justine: I think we were talking about emails. [laughs]

Colin: Yeah. That’s a great transition into the next thing. Oh, I know what I was saying. Right as soon as we cut out, I was saying how much I love the emails that you guys put together. I was really curious about the process that you guys go through to build those emails. They’re really colorful. You have these different sections, and they look beautiful on my desktop, on my mobile phone, which is really what Litmus helps its customers to do.

Justine: Yeah. I’d say one of the biggest challenges of doing email marketing for Litmus is the whole “eating your own dog food” thing. Marketing to marketers, or especially doing email marketing to email marketers, is really interesting sometimes. Every time we send an email out, we get a ton of praise, but we also get a ton of really critical comments about, “You should have done this,” “You should have done that.” “You should be practicing what you preach,” yadda, yadda, ya.
I have too much to say about this topic. [laughs] Our emails weren’t responsive up until very recently, when Kevin joined us a month ago. Occasionally, our emails were responsive, but our monthly newsletters were not. If I did an email or a webinar on mobile email, I knew that if I didn’t do a follow up email that was responsive, I was going to hear about it later.
Those emails in the past have definitely been responsive. Others like our newsletter, the turnaround was too quick. They were too complicated, and frankly. our stats didn’t support us doing mobile optimization, which is the funniest thing of all.
If people really dug a little deeper or thought a little more, they would see that we were practicing what we preach, because although we talk about mobile optimization a lot, we also talk about how it’s important to know your audience and know if it’s the right fit for your company.
It’s fun when you get to use your own software; you can probably attest to this, Colin.

Colin: Yup. [laughs]

Justine: It’s always fun when you can use your own software to do your own company’s business, so we use our own email analytics to look and see how many people are opening our emails on mobile, and it’s never really gotten above 15 percent that’s one five whereas the average that we’re seeing overall is more like 45. We’re way below average in terms of our mobile opens, and we’re a really small team, as I mentioned before, and it just was never really worth the effort to mobile optimize.

Colin: Let’s hypothesize about that for a minute. You’re saying you get 15 percent mobile. Do you think that’s because you’re a tool for businesses, and people are reading your emails during the workday, while they’re in the office?

Justine: Absolutely. I think that we’re a B2B company, so the majority of our opens I want to say like 60 percent come from Outlook and Apple Mail, which are desktop clients. I’m assuming that the Outlook users are primarily the more corporate or the more marketing based of our users, whereas the Apple Mail folks are primarily our designer audience, or the creative audience, that tends towards Mac. It makes a lot of sense, when you really think about it. Yeah, we have very few mobile opens, and even fewer mobile website visits, which is why our website isn’t responsive yet, either. Being small, you have to be smart about where you use your resources, and it just hasn’t made sense for us to do the mobile bit, up until now.

Colin: Cool. Yeah, I think that’s a really good practice for any company with limited time, limited attention, that you really need to look at your numbers to decide where to focus. There’s no point to build a mobile site if nobody looks at your site on mobile. I know, for a long time, we didn’t have a mobile site, but I ended up using ZURB’s Foundation, and they just make it really easy.

Justine: Oh, nice! They really do, yeah. ZURB is great. Yeah, I say make decisions based on data, not on your gut. Marketers are famous for being distracted by the latest shiny object that everyone’s talking about, and mobile has been a hot topic for a really long time. I don’t blame people for wanting to embrace it, but I think you have to be smart about how you want to embrace it.

Colin: Thinking about new people starting to do email today; we’ve talked a little bit about making that decision, about should you be mobile responsive. What are the other decisions and things to think about, that someone building their email program in 2013 need to think about, with regards to the design?

Justine: Oh, gosh. If you’re brand new to email, like if you’re starting a new company and you’re trying to send email from the ground up, I would say definitely start with a plan. Before you even think about mobile, just start with a plan. You produce excellent content about that type of thing. If you jump straight into design I know you had a blog post about this recently if you jump straight into the design process and just start making emails, but you don’t have any content to go into them, that’s probably a big red flag.
I think, first and foremost, you don’t need to have some giant strategy mapped out but you definitely need to have some sort of strategic goal in mind. That’s one of the best things about email, is that you can measure its performance really, really easily.
If you don’t have a goal in the first place or you don’t even know if your email’s going to work after you send it… [laughs] But in terms of design, I would say that companies that are in the travel industry or have really urgent communications or are communicating with consumers are more than likely going to have to think about mobile, before someone that’s B2B or serving an older audience, or some of those older things.
Again, your gut sometimes is really wrong, and your instincts can be surprising. I would say do what you can in the beginning. Focus on great content, simple designs that are going to be I would say mobile first. Make sure that they’re readable everywhere before you go embrace a full on responsive design because it can be a lot more effort, and sometimes not worth it, frankly, in the end.

Colin: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve seen is people want their emails to kind of look like their website in many ways. Then, a lot of times that prevents it from being responsive because they haven’t gone the extra step. It also prevents someone on a mobile device from reading the content.

Justine: Absolutely.

Colin: Probably the first step for people is, make it possible for everyone, everywhere, to read the content. Then focus on getting the design and the branding the way you want it, after.

Justine: There’s just one blog post. If you’re going to read anything about that topic that you just mentioned; the whole “Make it readable first,” Luke Wroblewski has a blog post called “Mobile First.” It’s literally a couple paragraphs. It will convince you. Go read it.

Justine: It just talks about that idea of making sure that the mobile user’s needs are considered first and foremost, because if you can read it on a mobile device you’re going to be able to read it on the desktop, is basically the argument, as far as that goes.

Colin: Got you. Once you evolve a little bit and you’re in a position to start making beautiful emails like Litmus does, what does your process look like? How do you guys go about it? Do you start in Photoshop? What do you do?

Justine: Yeah. The design that you mentioned a little earlier, how we have those blocks of content that are each a different color, has actually been in place for quite some time. The emails look different every time we send them. It’s actually kind of a really easy trick to make it look like you went and started from scratch every time in Photoshop, without having to. We just have a template that has these 100 percent width columns set up, and then a smaller container width nested inside. You just swap out the background color on each of those bars. Then we do go into Photoshop for the imagery, but that’s really about it. We don’t do a full layout.
We might do parts of it in a full layout every time if we’re doing something tricky or new, but for the most part you can just build each of those images in Photoshop, and then the whole rest is HTML and CSS.
We try to send email newsletters monthly, so probably about two weeks before we’re going to send; I have a Marketing Coordinator. We say, “What blog posts have gone live in the last month, since the last newsletter?” or “What do we want to make sure hasn’t gone live yet, but does go live for the newsletter?”
We kind of build our content strategy, frankly, around the newsletter because that’s what drives a fairly significant chunk of traffic to our website.
We’ll plan blog and blog content around the newsletter. Then, now that we have Kevin, the Content Designer it used to be me that did some of the design work for the emails; it used to be our UI designer that did some content and design for the emails but now Kevin owns the whole thing.
We’ll put together, in a Google Doc that everyone can edit and share, we’ll put all that content in a Google Doc and share it with Kevin, and he’ll start doing the basic layout for the newsletter. It’s really collaborative.
We’re small enough and we’re lucky enough that if we don’t like the way that text is breaking on a line we’ll go in and we’ll edit the headline, and that kind of thing. It’s not possible with big organizations that have to use templates and that kind of thing, but it’s really flexible and streamlined.
Say we want to send the email on Wednesday, but we did something quirky and ran into a rendering issue and we had to test it, it’s no big deal. We just push it off till Thursday. It’s really, like I said, collaborative, “agile,” to a certain extent. We just ship it when it’s ready. [laughs]

Colin: Has adding more people to the marketing team freed you up to explore new types of content? I noticed you doing some videos recently, and one that was particularly awesome was talking about the different pre processors in web mail clients, and the different things that happen when they pre process the emails that they display.

Justine: Yeah. Having a bigger marketing team, it has let us do some bigger, more ambitious projects. The conference is a really great example. We’re hosting this email design conference this fall.

Colin: Three cities, right?

Justine: Three cities, two days each. [laughs]

Colin: Yeah, it’s San Francisco, London, and Boston, right?

Justine: Yes, and you’ll be speaking there. We’re really looking forward to that.

Colin: I will. I’m very excited.

Justine: It’s hard enough doing that with three people, so I can’t imagine having done it just by myself, or without the help of Lauren and Kevin. The videos are an ongoing initiative. We hired a part time in house videographer, probably close to a year ago now. He’s here a day a week, and we have some ongoing initiatives like the understanding webmail rendering with the pre processors and stuff, that you mentioned that’s part of a three part series. We’re going to do desktop, mobile, and webmail.
Things like that definitely make it a little bit easier to have a bigger team. More resources mean that you can tackle more complex and more specialized things, but I think there’s a never ending wish list of things that we still want to tackle, too, no matter how many people we have.

Colin: Yeah. Well, I think you guys are doing an awesome job. Like us, like many other companies, you’ve focused on education and creating content that educates people, and I think, really helps people do their job better. I think that’s a really awesome way to grow and nurture your audience. Yeah, I love reading your content and watching your videos.

Justine: Thank you. Likewise.

Colin: Yeah. We’re about 20 minutes in now. You mentioned the conference; do you want to wrap up and tell people about anything else, you guys.

Justine: A shameless plug for the conference?

Colin: Yeah, a shameless plug.

Justine: Yeah, absolutely. I will welcome it. We’re hosting three email design conferences this fall. We’re coming into San Francisco at the end of September. We’re coming to London at the end of October, and then, to Boston at the end of November. You can go to Litmus.com/conference and check those out.
Colin’s going to talk about customer centricity and how that focus on awesome customer data can help the email experience. We’re going to have how data informs design decisions for email, a panel on how to improve workflow and process, and a whole bunch of other really awesome stuff. We’re really looking forward to it.

Colin: Yeah. I’m super excited to hear everyone else talk there. I think it’s going to be really, really great.

Justine: It’s going to be like the world’s largest meet up of email geeks.

Colin: Yup. [laughter]

Colin: Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time to talk today. I’m going to add a bunch of links to great content that you guys produce, and that Luke Wroblewski article that you mentioned in the blog post that accompanies this video. Thanks again, Justine, and I look forward to talking to you soon.

Justine: Yeah, thanks.

Colin: Bye.

Justine: Bye.