Effective Email Marketing In The Mobile Environment
By Jasmine Chambers
Five years ago, most businesses paid little attention to the way their marketing emails looked to recipients viewing them on their mobile phones. While the smartphone was in wide use then, those in charge of email marketing campaigns either didn’t notice or didn’t know enough about email design to do much about it, even if there was a problem.
Now, people rely on their smartphones to access the Internet far more than they rely on computers (56% versus 16%). It simply doesn’t make sense to ignore your largest audience segment when you design an email for a marketing campaign. You need to make sure that your emails look great on mobile screens.
Why Mobile Optimization Is Important
If you have ever opened a marketing email by a company that clearly didn’t think of mobile users, you know how it makes recipients feel. With text and buttons that stretch out of the screen and require you to scroll, placeholders for images or links, and a font that’s too big or too small, these emails tend to annoy. Compare these to well designed emails that present all page components so that they fit on the screen, have images and buttons that behave as they should, and a subject line that gives the reader something useful about the company, and the difference becomes clear.
It’s a basic fact of marketing of any kind. You can’t afford to annoy anyone. You don’t get the results that you hope for, and you create a poor impression as well. The fact that there are some large, well funded companies out there that make these mistakes doesn’t mean you, as a small business, can afford to be careless.
Here’s What To Pay Attention To
While the means to create mobile optimized emails weren’t widely available a few years ago, they are now. Simple tools and platforms help you make sure that no matter what kind of device your audience may have, your emails always look right. Here are pointers to keep in mind for your next email campaign:
The Subject Line: People don’t like to read much on mobile screens. Make sure that you have a subject line that’s no longer than five words. They should be attractive enough to pull readers in. According to Posirank (click to learn how to resell SEO), well designed subject lines on marketing emails can help encourage engagement and can boost your SEO effort in certain cases. For instance, you could try to promote an article on your site by sending out marketing emails for it. The more people that read and comment on it, the more popular it becomes on search engines. The way you word your subject line can enhance your call to action.
The Snippet: Most email clients will display the snippet of the first line of the body of email, right in the inbox, next to the subject line. On the vast majority of marketing emails, the first line reads something like “If you cannot view this email, click here to view it on your browser”. The fact that it can be annoying to see this line in the subject line is only one part of the problem. With every snippet reading this way in the same inbox, every marketing email seems the same. You need to make sure that the first line is an actual marketing message. While this would be suitable for recipients using computers, it would be far more relevant for mobile screens. Mobile users tend to be far more annoyed by being made to read useless text.
Get To The Point: No one has the patience to scroll around on a tiny mobile screen to see what your point is. You want to get to it in as few words as possible. Editing ruthlessly for concision is the best policy. It’s best not to use images, both because they take up too much space and make it harder for the reader to get to the text that mentions what it’s all about, and because Android phones turn off images in emails by default. If you need to use an image, it should be tiny, and it shouldn’t be central to your message.
Use A Single Column Layout: The typical mobile screen can only accommodate a single column of text. If you use two columns, you’ll force your readers to scroll, which is something you don’t want to do. Your font should be a regular 14-point for text and about 20 for your headlines, and it should be clear black-on-white. Fancy fonts and colors will make your message harder to read in the three seconds that the average consumer will look at them.
Have A Clear Call-To-Action In Mind: A marketing email isn’t poetry. You’re trying to make a point in a fun and attractive way to get your audience to do something. Use clear, large and bold text to make it easy for your readers to understand the following: What you are offering, why they want it, and what you want them to do. A call to action in the form of a large and easily clickable button is important. It’s an easy action to take, and it can make your readers feel like they can easily do what you want them to do.
Test: You should do a trial run, sending your email out to friends and colleagues to see what it really looks like on a number of different mobile phone models. Only then should it actually go out.
Success of Your Campaign Depends on Sending Mobile Friendly Email
Half of all people who use email check their messages before they roll out of bed in the morning, and 40% of email users check their email on the toilet. Both being times of few distractions. If you have a good marketing email that your recipients can actually look at without becoming annoyed, you have a good chance of success with them.
Jasmine Chambers works in marketing and shares her knowledge on the ever changing industry in her articles, whether you’re looking for help on email or social media marketing.
