6 Ways to Know If Your Emails are Friend or Foe of Recipients’ Mobile Devices
Love it or hate it: the fate of your emails (email marketing campaigns) now rests a lot upon their compatibility to target recipients’ mobile devices. With the surge of mobile device usage and types of mobile devices and platforms, email marketers have witnessed steady growth of email open rates on mobile devices, which is estimated as 30 percent increase from the year 2010 to 2015.
Hence, the message is clear – the better your email looks and functions on varying screen size, resolutions and platforms of mobile devices, the higher email open rate it achieves and conversion rates it drives. Now, the question is how to determine if your emails are looking and working just right on mobile devices – here are 6 checkpoints to determine how mobile-friendly your emails are.
1. Is your email width with 600-pixels?
Does your email contain an image which is bigger than 300-pixels? If it adorns such large image from the top or the banner, then recipients will not probably like the white space the image will appear as instead of its display on mobile devices. Especially if most of your targeted customers are accessing mails on Android devices or any other than iOS devices, then your emails will not automatically fit in to the width of screen size – that’s why the total width of your mails should not exceed 600-pixels.
In addition to setting the email width to 600-pixels, implement CSS width property to adjust the view on mobile devices. Also, is your mails ready for image-off email experience? Most users disable auto-image download option to protect devices against harmful image load and also, to save data bandwidth.
2. Shorter subject lines
While desktop versions of email applications have the capacity to show 60-characters long subject lines, whereas mobile devices cannot accommodate any subject longer than 25 to 30 characters. Thus, if your subscribers open most of their mails on smartphones or tablets than their computers, then mails with shorter subject line not more than 30-character long, will look impressive as they open your mails.
Also, subject lines that are teamed with a pre-header text (the introduction of your mail that precedes the subject line) can entice your prospects to open the mail – are your mails missing this short-yet-significant header?
3. Responsive email design templates
Are your emails created using responsive email marketing design templates? We offer clients mobile-friendly, responsive email marketing design templates that they can easily adapt their email marketing campaigns and make their mails ready for varying screen sizes of mobile devices and all major email applications such as, Apple iPhone Mail app, Outlook 2013, Gmail for Android and iOS, Yahoo! Mail Thunderbird, AOL Mail, Windows Live Mail and others.
Are your emails optimized to these mobile email apps? Growth of mobile-friendliness of email marketing campaigns is attributed to the growing trend of adopting responsive email design approach – also, Google also concluded that major email clients are going to standardize their sole support for only responsive mail design method.
4. Single column email layout
The best possible display layout to display the email content is through single-column email layout. This layout is used in most responsive email design templates unless a two-column layout is essential for any specific business requirements.
One column layout looks prim and presentable on lean width of mobile screen size and prevents readers from overlooking call-to-action phrase or links where you want to lead your readers and click. Thus, refrain from using multiple columns to make your email content appear more visible, readable and more clickable.
5. Crisp, concise email copy in larger fonts
Short email copies with are found out to be easily consumable within mobile users’ shorter attention span. That’s why copies that are broken into small paragraphs, bullet points, punctuated with relatable images are more mobile user-friendly and churn higher lead generation rates.
Also, emails written in larger fonts and contain small images in the mail body will please your readers and can stop them from deleting your mail because readers have to zoom in the content or squint their eyes to read – that’s why 13 or 14 font size of email copies can convey your message better than smaller sizes.
6. Clear Call-to-action
A distinct call-to-action is crucial in leading your prospects onto the landing page – hence, you must ensure the call-to-action is distinct from any other hyperlinked texts or copies. This part of the mail copy should suggest what actions to be done and the information recipients will find by clicking CTA of the email. In this regard, remember that if a mobile email user needs to tap the link more than once or if the CTA is not large and prominent enough to catch their attention, they might move to other mails.
Any CTA which is smaller than 40-pixels has lesser chances to engage prospects and most likely be overlooked. Another common mistakes email marketers commit is to bind the CTA within an image – if the image property is disabled, then your prospects will never be able to find the link on their mobile device.
In addition to these checkpoints, you must also scan your emails by other requisites to determine the fate of your mails being spotted, read and clicked by mobile email users. For this, ensure you have discarded menu bars (that adorn your website), stack of links, left adequate white space especially around hyperlinks to facilitate users tap their preferred links and tested mails on various mobile devices. But, we are digging more tips on how to determine mails are mobile-friendly – would you want to share your tips, maybe one or two? Drop your ideas at the comment section below.
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