Email Marketing in the Mobile world - 10 Tips for Responsive Design Email Newsletters
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Over half of all email is now opened on a mobile device and most people read work and personal emails together, getting all emails all at once via a their mobile.
More mobile devices are registered every day than there are weddings, babies born, and deaths COMBINED each day globally… x2!
How does the shift towards mobile change your marketing strategies?
According to Google’s Our Mobile Planet, email is the number-one smartphone activity—over 75% of smartphone users access their email via their phone.
Marketers are already experimenting with responsive designs for email marketing, optimising design for the small screens of mobile devices. Expect a big shift in email marketing, where optimisation for mobile phones will be prioritised over the PC.
- Open rates for email newsletters and corporate emails on smartphones have risen over 40%.
- Open rates on desktop computers have dropped over 18%
- 89% of consumers will delete a poorly formatted email if viewed on mobile. 27% will unsubscribe
A recent survey by eNewsletter software Mail Chimp surveyed participants on their email behaviour. 72% of the people read their emails in bed. Most people use their phones as an alarm clock, so the common morning action is to turn off the alarm and hit the email icon. Often readers haven’t even turned on the lights yet and are in bed reading your emails.
77% of participants reported that they check their email “everywhere” or “obsessively.” These readers have notifications set to alert them when an email arrives. They tend to check their mobile device immediately upon feeling that buzz or hearing the alert tone.
Email Marketing Design
About 40 percent of emails now get opened on mobile devices. The "one size fits all" approach to email design is no longer good enough.
One shot to get your eNewsletter read
The theory that people will open their email a second time on a PC or other device if the mobile version is hard to read is a myth. Only about 2% of openers will reopen an email on another device if the viewing experience on mobile isn’t satisfactory – making the design of your email newsletter just as important as the content.
Adopting responsive email design
is the first step in ensuring that your email marketing program is more
effective in 2014.
Responsive design
allows the sender to simplify the message and make it easier to see on different screen sizes.
Top 10 Tips for Responsive Design eNewsletters
- Minimise the number of clicks needed to navigate to the content.
- Keep it simple and intuitive
- Remove non-essential elements—design for mobile devices with images turned off.
- Divide content into clear sections by using a one- or two-column template.
- Increase open rate by making your subject line interesting and short – keep it to 35characters or less.
- Place all call to action offers above the fold
- Avoid using images as the only call to action.
- Allow enough space to click accurately on the mobile buttons
- Body font copy should be no smaller than 14 px
- Hide unnecessary pre-header and footer content
Responsive emails can highlight essential information in the mobile version of a message and hide elements that mobile readers don't need in order to understand your message or act on it.
Email Marketing Content
In today's society of instant gratification, people have short attention spans. They want the news in 140-character snippets, it’s easy for viewers to lose interest with an email newsletter that doesn’t get straight to the point or entice the viewers to click through to a landing page with an interesting subject line and introduction content.
The quickest way to turn people off your email newsletter is to be shameless self promoters – using your email newsletter only to talk about the great things you’ve done this month.
As a rule, make just one in six articles about you – but not just as a promotion, make sure it still adds value to your reader. For example, you may have launched free overnight shipping or a new local office – this is of great benefit to your customers – tell them. It was Josie’s birthday in accounts – really does your customer care?
If you’re not sure where to start with creating engaging content, below is a simple format that can be followed for any company, regardless of the business you are in
- News : Relevant business news or even industry news in order to keep your audience up to date
- Educational content: Emails that provide your recipients with content that discusses new concepts and helps expand their knowledge on a certain subject
- Reviews : Review useful sources that you assume or know your audience can benefit from
- Top Tips : Create a series of useful tips about your product or service
KEEP IN TOUCH
