There have been a number of reports recently that have put mobile email opens at between 15% and 35%, depending on industry. Whichever end you’re at it’s a significant proportion of people to ignore if you’re not optimising your emails for mobile. Do you currently know how your audience view your emails? And perhaps more importantly do you know how your emails look on mobile devices?
We’ve recently been making adjustments to some of our clients’ templates to help them work better on mobile. We also consider mobile displays now as standard practice when designing emails from scratch for clients.
Some ESPs will be able to give you some statistics on how many emails are opened(and clicked) on mobile devices, you may be able to work out from Google Analytics or other analytics software.
Below we’ve listed a few areas of consideration when we’re optimising emails for mobile.
Optimisation rather than re-creation
Most of the changes we’re implementing are improving existing templates so they display better on mobile devices. So you don’t necessarily need to go to great expense re-creating your email templates. Quite often mobile email clients will scale fonts and zoom out of the emails making them hard to read and requiring the user to first zoom in. One of the easiest changes to make is to add a couple of extra lines of code that will help make emails display at the right size.
Codes such as
style="-webkit-text-size-adjust:none"
and defining viewports in the meta tags will help ensure that emails clients aren’t playing havoc too much.
Think ‘tap’ rather than ‘click’
This is perhaps one of the main design considerations for mobile emails and it recognises that fingers are less accurate than a cursor. A typical adult finger covers 45 pixels when pressed against a mobile screen which is quite a large proportion of a mobile screen. Ensuring buttons and links have padding around them will help avoid frustrating tap errors. Horizontal menus with more than 4 items may start to cause problems.
When creating content for emails think about keeping CTAs clear of the body text and if there are several try and separate them from one another.
Keep emails short
Making sure your emails are short is something that we generally recommend anyway, and this is even more pertinent when considering mobile emails. Fewer words, shorter sentences and clear calls to action will help recipients navigate your email. Also higher contrast between both colour and font sizes will make the right things stand out.
It’s worth considering that recipients reading your emails on a mobile device may not be sitting and their desk but doing something or going somewhere at the same time. This makes trying to catch their attention even more important.
Sender, Subject, Pre-header
When flicking through emails on a mobile there is quite a lot less real estate for you to say who you are and what your email is about in the Inbox view. So make sure your Sender Name is immediately clear and something your recipients will recognise. Also make sure that the most recognisable part of the brand name is first.
Subject lines will often get shortened so make sure you have the most important words or information toward the front.
Like Gmail, many mobile email clients also pull the pre-header into the inbox view. This gives you a further opportunity to capture attention. Having ‘view online’ or ‘unsubscribe’ in this space is a waste. Use your pre-header to support your subject line and main CTA.
Now what about your website?
So once you’ve sorted out your emails and people are clicking through do you know what they see when they get to your website? Is their experience of your website optimised for mobile? Perhaps it’s worth having a look at?
What next?
If you would like to find out more about mobile email optimisation or would like your existing templates updated just let us know.
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