Eloqua App Review: Litmus App

Overall: Good bit of kit but not impressed at all by their pricing strategy

I was recently asked a question from of my subscribers about how to integrate Litmus with Eloqua.  Anonymous Subscriber – here is your reply and an overview for everyone else about what Litmus has to offer.

Litmus

Litmus is one of the two major email testing platforms, the other being email on acid.  Here are links to both platforms for you to look at:

• litmus.com
• emailonacid.com

Litmus from my experience is used as an email testing platform which will test your emails across 90+ different apps and email clients so you can ensure that your email will render correctly on all device / email client combinations.

Without an integration into Eloqua you would need to do the following to test your emails:

1. Create an email in Litmus by dropping your HTML directly from Eloqua

Your email then gets sent to 1600 Litmus owned testing machines that use real email client/app combinations.

2. Litmus software opens your Eloqua email

Their software opens your Eloqua email without making any modifications to the email itself.

3. Litmus screenshots your email

Litmus creates really nice screenshots of your email and populates your report with high quality images of your Eloqua email that represent what a user would see using each app/email client combination.

4. You then instantly see your email in the 90+ clients

You can then see how your Eloqua email renders in each of combination in the report that Litmus generates.

Litmus is awesome and a service like this should be used as part of any email checklist for approval before send.  There are a other features, including reporting, etc but I am not going to be covering those features here – because they are not part of the Eloqua Litmus App.

Installing the litmus app is really simple. 

You go to the Litmus app on the Oracle Maketplace:

https://cloudmarketplace.oracle.com/marketplace/en_US/listing/44386962

Click on Get App and then sign in using your API user credentials and that’s pretty much it.

To use the integration you need to go to an email in Eloqua and click on the cloud Icon in the top right.

This then gives you the associated Eloqua Litmus app, click on it.

Then just sign in with your litmus account.

You can now test your emails directly from the app rather than copy pasting the code and you get the results in your app.  Here is a video that Litmus have produced which details the Eloqua Litmus integration.

Overall I think the functionality of Litmus is amazing and it is a solid product however I am reviewing the app not the product.

Get ready because this is outrageous!

Litmus has three tiers of pricing (https://litmus.com/pricing):

• Basic
• Plus
• Enterprise

If you look at the bottom of each tier of pricing you will see that you need to have a different tier to be able to integrate different platforms.  Basically if you are Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor you can have your integration whilst only paying $199 per month which does little more I might add then remove the step of copy and paste into Litmus if you had logged in.

Even worse, if you use:

• ExactTarget
• Eloqua
• Silverpop
• Marketo
• Responsys

You need to have an enterprise account.  On enquiry I got a figure that was around $20,000 (USD).  I then decided to do my due diligence because I felt that there must be some additional functionality that these integration has over the other two email platforms.

Turns out – none.  If you go to this page you will see the full details: https://help.litmus.com/article/97-integrate-litmus-with-your-email-service-provider

Overall I was seriously unimpressed by their pricing strategy.  For something that does nothing more than stop your testers have to lift and shift email code from Eloqua to Litmus.  I also don’t understand why certain platforms have to have testers on Enterprise and others on Plus.

I would have thought it should be given away free as a value add.

I have reached out to Litmus sales to comment.  I doubt they will.  I am also going to review Email on Acid to see if they will offer you my dear reader a better value choice