Time to design email for mobile as standard?

by jamesmaxwell, posted on 12 July, 2012 at 10:16 am, filed under CRM, Digital Content, E-mail Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Mobile, Usability. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

Gmail on mobile phones

Where once mobile might have been an interesting channel for a few innovative brands to explore, changing consumer habits now mean that all brands need to put mobile at the heart of their marketing strategy.

When creating email campaigns, for example, it’s essential to recognise that a decent percentage of your customer database will be opening your emails on a mobile device.

In a recent LBi campaign, a much higher percentage of users opened the email on mobile than with desktop email clients (see below). We expected that the mobile open rate would be high because the company we were sending an email for was a B2C tech-savvy software company, and the email was sent on a Friday afternoon, but the results surpassed our expectations.

Device type total %
Desktop browser 73%
Desktop email client 3%
smartphone 24%
tablet 4%

 

Mobile Operating system   total %
iPhone OS 66%
Android 20%
Windows 7%
RIM OS 4%
Others 4%

 

So for this client, and many others, it’s worth spending more time on optimising the customer experience for iPhone and Android than it is for Outlook.

A few tips for designing emails for mobile

Keep it simple – Make it very clear to the customer what you expected them to do because screen real estate on a mobile device is valuable therefore look at simplifying elements of your email such as the navigation bar.

Increase the size of fonts and calls to actions because the finger replaces the mouse on mobile.

Use @media query so the email is fluid and is responsive to different device widths however be aware this does not work in Yahoo mail.

Hide content under an interactive element and then display it on tap of a button

Include a pre-header message at the top of the email that summarizes the main call-to-action of the email therefore it is easier for the user to identify the main purpose of the email. It will also be displayed next to the subject line on some mobile devices

Held in vertical orientation, most Smartphones have screens between 320 and 480 pixels wide, so aim to keep your emails below 640 pixels wide as default.

Questions to ask

What percentage of your database opens emails on mobile?

What tricks do you use for mobile email design?

James Maxwell (@MrJMax) is a Customer Strategist at LBi.