5 Actionable Mobile-Friendly Email Design Strategies to Boost Email Conversion Rates
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5 Actionable Mobile-Friendly Email Design Strategies to Boost Email Conversion Rates

According to Campaign Monitor, 68% of email campaigns were reported to be opened on mobile devices. Therefore, email having a mobile-friendly look and functionalities do not just seem right, but are a necessity. One of the most common challenges marketers face is ensuring their emails look great on mobile devices. Mobile devices have grown to be a massive media that over one-third of US mobile phone users use their mobile phone to go online–you might be reading this article on your mobile right now–and more than half of Americans check emails using their mobile device, as per a survey findings by the Pew Research Center. The best part is that because mobile devices make it extremely easy to check emails, making people access their inboxes more often than web-based email clients, they are more likely to find and open email newsletters, event invites and promotional communications. Therefore, emails must be fully optimized for various screen sizes and resolutions of various mobile email clients otherwise emails designed for desktop and laptop screens will look so terrible that recipients might not be able to view or read the message.  Hence, email templates must be optimized to the mobile devices to ensure emails will look great on diverse mobile devices and email clients and here are seven ways to make emails mobile-ready. 

1. Pay attention to the email subject line length

Common desktop email inbox displays can contain around 60 characters of email subject line whereas mobile devices cannot display subject lines more than 25 to 30 characters. A study by Return Path has revealed that most subject lines contain about 41 to 50 characters when they have surveyed more than 2 million emails from around 3,000 email senders. Marketers aiming to optimize subject lines for mobile devices should keep the ideal length of email subject lines and the percentage of their email subscribers who are expected to open email messages on smartphones, tablet devices, laptops or desktop devices in order to work out the most fitting subject line length for their campaign. If the major share of subscribers is projected to open email messages on iPhone, Apple Mail, Android Gmail or other mobile email clients, then the subject lines should not exceed a character limit of 25 to 30 to achieve maximum email open rates. 

2. Do not forget the impact of preheaders 

Preheaders come in exceptionally handy when marketers need a slightly longer email subject line to explain the offer. Though mostly underused, these preheader texts are proven to be immensely useful for email messages for mobile devices where longer subject lines are a necessity and a great challenge to include value in subject lines for mobile-friendly emails. Simply put, preheader texts provide the first line in email messages that help extend the copy of subject line in order to add more value and context to prompt subscribers to open emails. Though email users find options to customize the settings to whether view the preheader text but, most users stick to the default settings and view this preview copy just as those are created for the email. The preheader text length can differ from email client to another and from one device to another, so we recommend experimenting with varying lengths to determine which works best for the devices where most of your subscribers are going to open your emails. 

3. The email copy must be concise

When marketers craft email copy to achieve the utmost mobile optimization, they need to remember that they must keep it as short and crisp as possible. Marketers should bear in mind that short, easily consumable, snackable and scannable copies of email content makes it easier for the audience to read and understand within a shorter span. The most effective pieces of concise and crisp pieces of email copies are smaller paragraphs, bulleted lists and segmented content divided in tables and parts so that subscribers can view and grasp the email messages faster and take the intended actions or click the links in the email. 

Since the overall screen size of mobile devices are smaller than desktop devices, recipients are known to multitask when they receive email message on mobile and consuming the email copy. Hence, it is crucial to limit the quantity of email as much as possible by incorporating prominent headers, smaller paragraphs, bullet points, segregated texts to improve the prospects of engaging with the audience as much as possible. 

4. Take a close look at in-mail images and graphics 

Not every mobile device can display in-mail images and graphics as the default option. Marketers need to remember that many email clients enable users to prevent images from loading and displaying when they open emails. Many subscribers may set this option to keep images to be displayed by default with email loading. That’s why it is important to have a plan to provide “images off” email experience to their subscribers and help them understand the email message even when the images do not load or they prefer not to see image by clicking “show remote content” or “display images” option. Blocked email images can be a huge challenge for emails where images are necessities, especially for transactional emails such as product shipment, delivery confirmation emails wherein email copies need to clearly communicate the items that are displayed using the images. Therefore, marketers should consider images as optional elements and heavily focus on textual explanation to deliver the message clearly even when the images fail to load or users do not load images. 

5. The CTAs should take the front seat 

The call-to-action or CTA must be positioned in the front and center while planning email copy to enable on-the-go and busy email subscribers to get to the point as fast as possible. A CTA placed in the center can easily demonstrate and prompt them the action to take within a few seconds. It is best to position the call to action text near the top of email message to make those appear more distinctively on mobile email clients to ensure your emails are the most mobile-friendly and to get maximum clicks on emails, we recommend the CTA buttons to be minimum 44 x 44 pixels.

Along with these tips, there is another way to ensure your emails are the most mobile-friendly and attain the open rates by creating emails with adequate white space near those CTAs and around links to make those appear and clickable at the most, so that there is plenty of space surrounding the link or the CTA button that subscribers do not click something else accidentally and at the first attempt.