How is Litmus doing?

For email developers, Litmus’s code editor reportedly lacks many of the developer-centric touches that they’ve come to expect either from their home IDE of choice (Sublime Text, Atom, VS Code, etc.) or from newer tools like Parcel.

That includes features around the writing of code like the lack of a code linter, as well as the lack of client-specific syntax highlighting and formatting to help write e.g. Outlook-specific email code.

The core reason for an email developer to use Litmus’s email coder would be that their organization already pays for Litmus either for its testing/previewing capabilities or for a non-technical marketing team to use to build emails.

Notably, Litmus today touts integrations with desktop IDEs like Atom, Dreamweaver, Brackets, and Sublime Text that give developers working in their IDE access to Litmus features.

Litmus has been active for nearly 20 years and over that time, they’ve built up one of the strongest brands in the email marketing and development space.

Their website brings in ~500K visits per month, and 700,000 people—including 80% of Fortune 100 companies—use Litmus.

Their conference, Litmus Live, has been one of the core conferences in the email world since its first iteration in 2013 as “The Email Design Conference”. The Litmus blog was, for years, one of the best sources of information for all things around email development and design.

Just as Customer.io was early in positioning a brand around the practice of using data to inform email sends, Litmus was early in positioning a brand around the idea of email design, testing, and development.

Litmus’s years-long practice of writing blog posts about email optimization and design has helped them cement that brand with both developers and marketers—one email developer we talked to recalled that finding Litmus blog post for specific problems like making images render in specific clients was key to their impression of Litmus’s trustworthiness.

Developers who are building email functionality into their products at companies like Podia and Beacons use Litmus to help ensure that the features they’re building generate emails that will look the same across the many clients and devices that their customers might be using.

During the development process, they might use an email block coded in React to generate an email that gets sent into a Litmus inbox that automatically generates previews and QA for Apple Mail, Gmail, Outlook, and so on. Then, they can spot check those previews for any problems.

Finally, they’ll either modify their application code to adjust, or they’ll make smaller tweaks inside Litmus’s code editor directly.

Some companies that use Parcel for coding marketing emails keep an active Litmus account for emails that don’t need the fine-grained coding features of a Parcel, or for departments/teams that aren’t on paid Parcel seats.

At Figma, for example, the marketing operations team that owns all marketing email across the organization writes all emails in Parcel. Transactional emails are run by the product and engineering team, and they use Litmus to test those. The product and engineering teams share one paid Litmus account to do that.

Litmus is a subscription SaaS company that prices primarily based on the number of seats a customer needs and the number of email previews they use per month.

The Basic plan ($99/month) allows for one user (though sharing a login is possible) with 1,000 email previews included. The upgraded Plus plan ($199/month) bumps that up to 5 read and write users with 2,000 email previews included.

Companies that need more than that pay a custom price on Litmus’s Enterprise plan—Mark, formerly at Rebel Mail, reported getting quoted $20,000 per month prior to their acquisition by Salesforce.

One factor that drives many forced upgrades to a custom priced plan is that Litmus counts each client and device as a separate preview—by testing an email on all ~100 different clients Litmus supports, a team will instantly run through 1/10 of their allotted previews on the Basic plan.

We talked to folks who mentioned that they’re highly conscious of Litmus’s steep pricing curve and in turn, share logins and throttle their own usage of the preview function (i.e. by limiting the clients and devices that they test on) in order to stay below the threshold that would put them on a Plus or Enterprise plan.

The typical workflow for an email developer or marketer using Litmus (or any similar email design tools) to send emails was that they would copy and paste HTML into Litmus (or send it to a special Litmus email address), edit it, and then export or download it for importation into their ESP.

Over the years, Litmus has been taking steps towards removing the manual, copy-and-paste, import-export dynamics of creating and sending emails via Litmus. With select ESPs, Litmus can sync directly into the ESP, eliminating the step of moving HTML from app to app.

In addition, the Litmus Chrome Extension gives users the ability to get Litmus previews directly inside their existing ESP—the extension is available to users of Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, Mailchimp and Pardot (on the Plus plan) and Salesforce, Acoustic Campaign, Marketo, Eloqua, Responsys, and Adobe Campaign Standard (on the Enterprise plan).

Sinch’s core offering is a way for mobile developers to bring communications into their app, much like Twilio: programmable voice, SMS, verification, chat, and video.

In 2021, Sinch acquired the Pathwire family of brands—Mailgun, Mailjet and Email on Acid—for about $2B, giving them a beachhead into email marketing akin to Twilio’s acquisition of SendGrid in 2019.

These three tools—Mailgun, Mailjet and Email on Acid—give Sinch a comprehensive suite of products for email sending, validation, and marketing:

Sinch (STO: SINCH) grew sales 50% in 2022—to $2.7B up from $1.8B in 2021. More than 150,000 companies use the Sinch Customer Communications Cloud to message their customers across more than 60 countries.

Email products brought in $137M of net sales for Sinch in 2022, up from $7.4M in 2011—the vast majority of that came from Pathwire’s acquired properties.

By acquiring the Pathwire businesses of Mailgun, Mailjet, and Email on Acid, Sinch picked up a range of products to cross-sell into their existing customer base to increase ARPU.

They also picked up a 100,000-strong base of customers and engaged software developers—including at Microsoft, Wikipedia, the NHL, and American Express—into which they could cross-sell Sinch’s existing products.

Sinch started working in Q1’22 on cross-selling Sinch’s messaging products into that base of software developers, and they reported moving 2 customer contracts over to Pathwire’s email products by the end of March.

In Q2’22, they began investing more in marketing Mailgun, Mailjet and Email on Acid to international audiences, launching new websites in English, French, German and Spanish.

In Q4’22, they launched Portal—a new user interface that makes Mailgun and another one of Sinch’s products, InboxReady, available in the same application, with the goal to facilitate better cross-selling across them.