Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

“How many of you have read an email on your phone and marked it unread so you could read it on your PC later?” That’s the question Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, posed at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. We bet a few of you just nodded your heads in agreement… 37% of emails are now opened on a mobile device, and if you are sending out marketing emails with fixed borders and widths you are in danger of losing customers as they delete or close emails that they can’t read. Open rates on mobile devices have increased 300% since 2010 and given smartphone sales continue to rise this figure will only rise with it. Here are our top tips to make sure your brand never loses out on a mobile device:

1. Test, Test and Test Again
If you do nothing else, test your email in a variety of devices – desktop browsers, tablets and a range of mobile devices. Don’t assume that because your email looks good on an iPhone that it will look good through the Yahoo Mail app on an Android.

2. Keep your subject lines short
Smartphones have smaller screens than desktops – so it pays to make sure that users can see the entire subject line no matter what device they access on.

3. Use a Responsive Template A Responsive Template essentially does “what it says on the tin” – it modifies the email view depending on the device viewing it so that the entire email can be read with minimal left to right scrolling.

4. Make your call to action clear and concise
When you are reading emails on a smaller device the last thing you want is to have to trawl through a number of paragraphs to find out what the message is really trying to tell you. Keep it short, punchy and at the top of the email body.

5. Make your links large enough for touch-screen
There’s nothing worse than trying to share content and finding that the Facebook or Twitter logo in the email you are reading is too small to touch, so make them a good size and then test again. Finally, make sure that the analytics tool you are using is capable of reporting back results that break down information about the mobile devices being used to read your email marketing – this will give you insight to further optimise your future campaigns.

This article first appeared on Digital Ministry in February 2013.