Challenge
Every email in Litmus has a “Summary” view that includes a due date, status, task list, and other information related to the project management side of email campaigns. While those features see decent usage, our customer research found a lot of teams primarily organising their campaigns and workloads in dedicated project management tools. Creation of the email itself is a sub-cycle in their wider campaign planning — one of several tasks as far as the marketing manager might be concerned, but with its own lifecycle for those who work on it directly.
We set out to help users bring more awareness of the email production process to their wider teams, and not just the developers or marketers working on production. Knowing that Trello was one of the most commonly used project management tools for our customers, we began exploring integration capabilities.
Solution
The Litmus Power-up option on a Trello card gives users the option to select from the most recent emails in their Litmus account or search all of their emails. They can then attach one or more emails to the “back” of a Trello card (the expanded details view). This will add the email’s title, description, due date, status, and number of tasks to a special section on the card. It also displays a thumbnail image of the email.
We also got to ship a few nice-to-haves. If a card has at least one email attachment, a Litmus logo and attachment count will also appear on the front of the card in the full board view. When a litmus.com link is added in a Trello comment, it appears decorated with a favicon and the URL’s meta title.
More importantly, users can create a new Litmus email directly from any Trello card, which is really helpful in project management workflows in which those two tasks are done upfront. No need to go to Litmus, create the email, come back to Trello, and manually link the two together.
Our integration was selected by Trello as a featured Power-up and given prominent billing in their marketplace. This ship also opened the door to a content marketing partnership between Litmus and Trello across both companies’ blogs and social channels.
Feature release video
External links
Credits
I contributed product design, illustration, and frontend code to this feature. I built and shipped this alongside product manager Michael Waterston and engineers Rahim Packir Saibo and Mark Connell.