The increase in smartphone usage is altering email marketing planning, especially how emails are designed for mobile devices to drive immediate customer action.
Though text and instant messaging communications are popular, consumers still rely on email as the main form of communication with brands. Companies still use email as the primary means of announcing sales and other limited-time offers. A considerable majority of smartphone users check email on their phones, but they do it very quickly by scanning through their messages. Accordingly, email optimized for mobile needs to consider users' very short attention spans. Its content should load quickly, it must be easy to comprehend, and it has to have clear and simple calls to action.
1. You need an optimization strategy
You simply cannot ignore the growing number of people who check email only on their phone, because many of them will not engage with non-optimized emails that are difficult to navigate and are unprofessional in brand appearance. Consider a company that has several auto-responders set up to thank visitors for a purchase or welcome them to a monthly newsletter.
2. Make it easy to click
Mobile-optimized emails need to be pleasing to look at and also as functionally accessible as possible. Nearly all emails include clickable links that encourage the recipient to make a purchase or learn more information. You need to make it as simple as possible for mobile users to click those links .
Another tip is to not put clickable links in a row or otherwise next to each other. For example, avoid putting three live links to email addresses right on top of each other .Think about actions from the user's perspective. Once they click a link, it will pop open their preferred email client and create a message to the email link. If they click on the wrong one, then they need to close that message and go back to the original email.
3. Short subject lines
Testing can prove to be invaluable when finding the ideal length for mobile-optimized subject lines. Check your emails on several different email applications and devices to see how much of the subject line typically appears. You really want to focus on the first 4-5 words to ensure your message sparks a sense of immediacy and clearly communicates the purpose of the email.
4. Keep it light
The components of a mobile-optimized email should work together to be as light as possible. Although mobile internet speeds are catching up to desktops, they still are not quite as fast.
Keeping the email under 20kb is a good benchmark. That might not always be possible, but it does provide a good guideline. If it's done correctly, you can compress images to reduce their size without any loss in quality, as they need to be scaled properly so a huge image doesn't take too long to render. You should also build a text-only version, as many mobile users are selecting text-only email, just as they might when viewing on their computer.
5. Watch the width
Six hundred pixels is a standard width for emails, which works perfectly well when they are opened on desktops or even tablets. For smartphone viewing, when you have 300-400px width screens, you need to use "if/then" code rules that can automatically resize the email to match the screen size.
You'll notice many of the best-designed emails are built with narrow blocks of content that seem as if they are stacked on top of each other in a single column. All of the info can't just be placed at the top of the email, so you need to set it up where the content will logically flow from topic to action as the recipient scrolls down.
6. Keep Testing
Marketers who send out traditional email campaigns understand the need to test both the response rates to the creative and the nuts and bolts of the email . Testing is vitally important when designing for mobile devices. Be sure the test emails are sent to a variety of devices, especially those on different platforms and with varying screen sizes. Look at the cut offs for the subject line and the pre-header to be sure they make logical sense and don't misrepresent your brand or offer when read in a shortened form. Look at the email width to be sure images are properly lined up and the core offer is readily apparent on the screen.
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