Emails are increasingly accessed through mobile devices
Smartphone and tablet use is exploding and consumers are now choosing to use their mobile devices to complete tasks they would previously have performed on desktops and laptops. One of the most obvious of these changes is reading and responding to emails.
According to statistics from ReturnPath an estimated 88% of people check their emails on their phones daily and 41% of Europeans will delete an email that is not mobile optimised. With this in mind, designing emails for mobile devices is essential.
In this article we will:
- Discuss the importance of optimising emails for mobile
- Talk through the options
- Discuss key design points of designing for mobile
Why is mobile optimisation of emails important?
Customers are constantly on the go and the likely hood is they are checking their emails of smaller devices than their desktops. If you are not optimising your emails for these users, you are losing a big opportunity and wasting your email marketing efforts.
“You have one chance to get someone to respond to an email,” says John Watton, Senior Marketing Director at Silverpop. “As smartphone usage explodes, it’s imperative to design email messages so people can interact with them on their mobile devices.”
If your customers are interacting with your messages on different devices you need to make sure you are creating the best possible experience for them on each of these devices. If they get a bad experience, the chances are they won’t continue their journey later on.
What are the options?
There are really two options when it comes to optimising your emails for mobile devices. You can create a separate mobile aware design option which will be served to people on their mobile devices. Or you can use responsive design which will mould itself to suit any device or screen size.
One of the easiest methods is responsive design. It means that you don’t have to think about creating emails to suit each individual device option – one size literally fits all. Some email marketing service providers offer responsive templates.
“We take mobile very seriously and this is a key consideration when designing emails,” says Graeme Horne, Marketing Director, hungryhouse.co.uk.
“Currently around a third of hungryhouse customers open our emails on their smartphone so the mobile display needs to be perfect.
“We use ‘responsive design’ to automatically resize emails to fit the width of the device it is viewed on in addition to removing designated images and re-sizing text to ensure it is readable. We have seen a clear uplift in email interaction rates since we changed our email templates to become device-responsive.”
Design points
Regardless of which route you decide to go down – here are some design pointers which will help to make your emails more digestible on smaller screens.
Be ruthless and cut down your content
Having too much information in an email being read on a mobile device will make it difficult to read for your customers. If you have a purpose with the email keep is simple and only include the basics.
Put important information at the top
People are unlikely to want to sit and scroll down your email to get to the important stuff – this should be at the top and easy to distinguish as the point of the email.
Use a single column layout
The information you are feeding to your audience should be in a single column to avoid them having to try and scroll across – this is difficult on a mobile. A single column looks simple and uncluttered and will encourage reading on a smaller device.
Include a clear call to action
If you are hoping that your customer will react to the email in some way make this clear and create a large, obvious call-to-action. Don’t make buttons too small as people won’t be able to touch them on tiny screens.
Keep imagery to a minimum
Having a nicely designed email is all well and good but if you cram it full of large images they will take a long time to load on a mobile device. If it it’s necessary, don’t include it.
Chose a great headline
This is important for all emails but even more so for emails opened on mobiles. People simply won’t bother opening something they aren’t interested in while they are on the go so try and come up with something that will appeal to them and is relevant.
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