Mobile Email Marketing Best Practices

As mobile web is steadily becoming the main face of web as such, mobile devices are now more depended on for accessing emails. Various studies indicate that almost half the people in many digitally advanced countries access emails through mobile and a majority of this is done via smartphones. Naturally for email marketers mobile represents a new horizon of opportunities.

While tapping the opportunities for mobile platforms is priority for email marketers, mobile friendly email design became an indomitable criterion now. While scaling down the emails to fit the mobile screen is the most common practice there are other design elements that have been more effective to attract attention and engage customers.

Why mobile friendly email design is important?

While web pages are searched, browsed and read by users, most users prefer to check and skim emails. While a majority of your audience use smartphones your emails just cannot afford to remain as old fashioned. Now emails should primarily be designed for the mobile audience. Either you send emails optimized for mobile devices or just get trashed without being looked upon. A majority of studies conducted already stated that nearly 50% of smartphone users prefer to delete emails that just do not display properly on their device. Reading emails on smaller screens of mobile phones is a bit challenging compared to desktops and naturally emails that make things easier for the audience will only be read and get a response.

According to a latest study published by eDialog states that around 80% of users just find it challenging enough to read emails on their mobile devices. The same study also states that around 15% of all users faces trouble to scroll to read all information while accessing the mail from mobile. 9% of users according to the same study complain about a surplus of textual content while around 8% of users complain of poor quality emails in images.

To avoid these issues and challenges let us explain below some of the mobile email marketing best practices.

Design and display of contents

Screen size is a typical concern while designing emails for mobile devices as it varies from one device to another. Apart from the constraints of screen size there is another important thing to remember in case of mobile friendly design. While designing for mobile you have far less real estate than on a desktop monitor. Let us begin with some handy tips.

• You can always use some mobile-friendly templates that are flexibly designed to look great on a variety of screen sizes.
• While using mobile friendly design templates always remember that single column templates are good for displaying your content on small screen sizes.
• Have a clear and concise message to get your point across in a glance.
• Stay clear of using tables and charts as they are harder to read on mobile devices. In case using tables is absolutely necessary you should always set the width by percentage rather than pixel count. By setting the width by percentage you can ensure automatic resizing of emails.

Text, font and color

This is of prime importance as average mobile user just focuses on any email text for only 3 to 5 seconds and if he does not find anything interesting prefers to skip and trash the mail. So, make sure that the email text is clearly readable and offers something useful at the very first glance. To make the email instantly lucrative you should bring branding message and promotional message or benefits of the product or services above the fold.

There are few strict no-no’s that you should keep in mind while striving to design great mobile emails. For instance, dark colored tables and backgrounds are just detrimental to the readability of your mails. Remember more than anything else your text is what explains everything and your design elements should only work towards optimizing their readability.

Second big consideration about emails is the font size. Just avoid using experimental or too stylized fonts that make readability suffer. In regard to font size it is always advisable to use 12 pt for content body and 20 pt for headlines. Often large fonts are readily taken as a trigger for spam emails. Moreover, larger font can only be used contextually and while using bigger fonts you should keep the text brief. Using color in the email text is a trigger for spam and you should avoid it at any cost. Mobile emails may be accessed on the go or in holidays or just in a tour or inside the kitchen. Naturally, you should ensure optimum text readability on mobile devices.

Using images in emails

Images just explain things at a glance and coupled up with minimum amount of effective text they can quickly bring attention of the users. But using images inside emails has its negative sides too. There are mobile devices that just do not display images by default and there are other mobile devices that block images at the first instant and thereafter offers prompts to display images. Secondly, ensuring quality image output is also a big concern. Without proper and high density image output you are likely to lose the attention you have garnered with the first glance.

• Make sure your images render appropriately with the proper pixel density and image size.
• Do not offer a clueless image that just does not say what it is all about.
• If your email content is made up of the image alone you are at risk of losing users while the image just fails to load properly. Use images in your content but always as a great supplemental value to your text content.

Clear call to action buttons and clickable links

Call to Action buttons are more effective than text links. While providing CTA buttons make sure there are enough vacant places around it. Make sure your CTA buttons are pretty actionable and offers one tasks at a time. Placing the CTA button has an important role as well. The CTA buttons should be placed high up above the text of the mail with lot of white space around.

Quick recap of the email design tips for mobile

Before finishing the resent discussion let us have a quick recap of the effective email design tips for mobile.

• Always design keeping small viewports in mind.
• Leave the top area of the email page for CTA buttons and headline.
• While using logo do not use them too prominently or inconsiderably as this will quickly make users think of spam. Do not use logo in the header.
• Use images as supplemental contents rather than as the main content. Images failing to load can just make your effort lead to astray.
• Utilize social media interactions as CTA buttons to increase relevance to the content.