• by Jess Nelson , October 27, 2015

Litmus, an email marketing technology company, says the new funding will go toward hiring additional staff, supporting global expansion, providing educational services to email marketers and improving product engineering.

"Email will continue to see massive growth because marketers know that subscribers are their most valuable customers," says CEO Paul Farnell. He says Litmus wants to "simplify email complexity."

Litmus currently offers email creation, testing and analytic tools for email marketers and designers.

Per Farnell, Litmus will use the new funding to create new educational services for email marketers. Email technology is changing rapidly, and Litmus hopes to help email marketers bypass technical hurdles.

Litmus enables email marketers to test the subscriber experience by reviewing images, video, content and links in an email. It tests email campaigns and landing pages to ensure they are optimized for any device.

“Speed is a big focus for us,” says Farnell. “The industry standard is 10-15 minutes, but email marketers are often in a time crunch because they often have other roles in the company.”

From a time-saving standpoint, he claims the company “reduces the anxiety of hitting that send button.”

In addition to click and open rates, Litmus’ analytical tools include tracking how long a customer read an email, where they read it, what device they read it from, and if they shared it, forwarded it, or printed it out. Analytics then feed back into the platform for improved segmentation capabilities.

Farnell says mobile optimization and segmentation should be top priorities for email marketers today.

“Email opened on mobile devices broke the 50% mark a few years ago. If you’re not sending emails that are optimized for mobile, you lose out on a huge revenue opportunity,” he says.

Today’s investment comes from private equity firm Spectrum Investments, and marks Litmus' first institutional investment. Pete Jensen, managing director of Spectrum, and Mike Farrell, principal at Spectrum, will both join Litmus’ board.