Optimising email for mobile

Email marketing is one of the strongest and most fruitful ways to bring customers to your website, but in a world where a large proportion of people access email on their phones, optimising email for mobile has never been more important.

“How many of you have read an email on your phone and marked it unread so you could read it on your PC later?” Asked Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at Goldman Sachs’ Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco recently.

Her argument was that mobile email is still not optimised enough. Chances are you have a mobile optimised version of your website, or at least you’re thinking about one but what about your emails?

At a time when research estimates that 88% of smartphone users check emails on their mobile devices, there is a huge opportunity for ecommerce sites to make sure email marketing campaigns are optimised also.

“The Ofcom 2012 Communications Report reveals that 58% of us have smartphones, and email apps have made it easier than ever to sync your accounts and pick up your messages on the go,” says Ben Dyer, CEO of ecommerce software supplier SellerDeck.

“If your emails aren’t optimised correctly for these formats, they run they risk of being sent straight to the trash, their content ignored. Don’t let your email campaigns, offers, costumer correspondence or confirmations go un-read; make sure you are ready and optimised for every platform available to your customer.”

Here are a few tips and tool to keep in mind when optimising your email campaigns.

Cut down the content

You can’t put the same amount of detail into a mobile mail campaign. If you cut the content down to the most important info, you can make sure your message gets across effectively and you customers don’t get lost.

Make sure your picture sizes are small

Loading up images on a mobile can take even longer than on regular mail so make sure you’ve cut down the size as much as possible. JPEGMini is a good site for quickly and easily cutting the weight off your images.

Customise your alt text and colour

This is a small detail but often when your email pops up in mobile mail servers, the images are off as a default. They will display as a background colour and alt text. You can customise these so that they fit in with your design. It’s a nice little bit of attention to detail.

Use a responsive email template

You never know which kind of mobile device someone is going to view your email on – which makes it hard to design for all. This will modify the way an email looks depending on the device it is being read on.

Sites like Mail Chimp provide this kind of service.

Test what they look like

No matter how good the software you are using to create your mobile campaigns on – you should always check them to make sure – especially if you are making changes.

Most template providers will let you check emails first or you can use specialist testing sites such as Litmus.

Make sure you have a clear call to action

If your email campaign is designed to bring customers back to your site, make sure the link back is big, bold and easy to tap with fingers. There’s nothing worse than struggling to press a small link or searching for the next action point. Make it as easy as possible.

Track everything through analytics

Once you have gone to the effort of optimising your emails you need to know how popular they are and what reaction they are getting from your customers. Make sure your analytics provider is geared to track your emails clicks as well as everything else.