Savvy email marketers know that emails aren’t being read just at the office anymore. When people are stopping at lights or waiting in line at the store, they now whip out their mobile devices and check their email. So, to keep your email communications engaging, you need to focus on designing for, well, everything. Sound like a tall order?
Don’t worry—email was practically made for mobile devices, says Loren McDonald,a MarketingProfs University instructor and vice president of Industry Relations at Silverpop. In his Email Marketing Essentials talk, McDonald offers these quick tips for creating email newsletters that shine on mobile devices:
1. Write snappy, engaging pre-header text. It’s the snippets of info that show up before anything else does. It’s the first peek at your content for the reader, so make sure you don’t waste their attention. Use it, and use it well.
2. Offer clear calls to action in different formats. “Using different language and creative, buttons, and things that all direct people to the same call to action is important,” says McDonald. Folks may completely overlook a graphic element that’s a call to action, but will notice a link instead (and vice versa).
3. Use alt attributes (tags). Give people a quick sense of what’s behind an image by providing tags. Not every email client recognizes it when images are turned off, but it’s still worth using for those email clients that do read them.
4. Incorporate text over images. Make sure the text in a link shows, so that something is still in front of your readers’ eyes, even when images aren’t being loaded.
5. Design for the touch. McDonald says, “Our fingertip is replacing the mouse.” Keep that in mind by designing emails with links and blocks of text that are easy to touch. If your links are too close together, that might be fine for a mouse-click, but it’s a different story for fingers.
6. Use scalable fonts and images. Use cascading style sheets (CSS) for mobile devices. “They can determine the size of the screen that the email will render on and then size the images and fonts up or down to be perfect for that device.”
Have any other tips you’d add to the list?
To learn more about email marketing, sign up for the Email Marketing Essentials course at MarketingProfs University. You’ll enjoy 11-plus hours of intensive, online instruction by 15 email marketing experts. The course features 14 classes broadcasting live May 12 through 27 and then on demand through May 2012 (in case you miss any classes).
Tags: Content, customer experience, Email Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
I’m in the process of researching email marketing as I am getting a good amount of traffic to my blog. This is really good information.
I’m glad you guys are in my inbox!
Happy that it was good timing, Ramiro!
Great advice, Veronica. I especially like the one about links in text. As any woman with longer fingernails can attest to, getting a clean hit is a challenge!
Thanks, Elaine! And you’re spot on with that comment.
I really like these tips and have passed along this article to the staff designers as well as content creators. We’re going to try the pre-header text very soon.
Very nice! Glad to be helpful. Best to you in your pre-header texting endeavors!
Very useful information, Veronica! Thanks for the tips!
I especially liked the reminder to use call to actions in different formats – it’s easy to forget that people react to visual elements differently.
Thanks Veronica. One other suggestion from a call to action standpoint is to incorporate phone numbers instead of, or in addition to, links. Some mobile devices feature these numbers as links, which when clicked will launch a phone call. Simple for the recipient and if you’re using a call tracking solution, easy for you to track any conversions. We recently wrote a blog post which you’re readers might find helpful “5 Ways to Improve Mobile Website Converions” http://www.mongoosemetrics.com/blog/2011/02/22/5-areas-to-improve-mobile-website-conversions/ — Thanks again for your article.
I endorse the concept of placing one intro sentence before any images/links… since many devices such as the BlackBerry can mangle links and images (especially if they have long tracking codes), the BlackBerry will show you the first bit of the message, which is your plain text sentence. This also works well for Outlook too! More at my blog http://www.dansoschin.com/tag/e-mail-2/
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