Email Marketing Formatting Tips For Mobile Devices
More consumers are reading their emails on BlackBerrys, iPhones, and Android phones as the appeal of mobile devices continues to soar. The more this trend develops, the more important it will be to have a strategy for reaching this growing segment of readers. Designing your marketing material for the mobile audience is critical, and links are among the most important aspects that need to be accounted for.
The size of your links is arguably just as important as how you place them. For example, links that are either too small or, more importantly, too crowded together can be difficult to activate for subscribers using mobile devices with touch screens. Your message should be convenient for the user to read and to navigate, and both the size and placement of your links play important roles in just how easy it is for your readers to get the information they need.
Challenges for Mobile Email Links
As email marketers continue to try their hand at mobile marketing, they continue to uncover more of the challenges that are associated with using this channel effectively. Some of the challenges that affect your link strategy include:
Smaller Windows – Mobile devices and their compact screens make it somewhat difficult to create links of optimal size. Due to the current landscape, you must adapt from optimizing your message for the desktop window to insuring that your message fits in the palm of the reader’s hand and maintains its impact. The situation has resulted in some marketers developing a newfound appreciation for the preview pane.
HTML Rendering – Many of today’s smartphones are capable of delivering the web experience in all its glory, but HTML email rendering is a problem for some of them. While most devices have no trouble rendering text, rendering HTML in the inbox is still a tricky endeavor for some devices, meaning that your message could be chock full of broken links you should always send a viable plaintext version of your campaign.
Mobile Device Usage – How consumers use their mobile devices also impacts your link strategy. The average person is not reading email on a smartphone while sitting at the desk in their home or office. They are reading it while waiting at the airport, while sitting in the bleachers at the little league baseball game or while out shopping. Consumers are scanning messages more than ever and if your mobile links are not optimized, they will be far less likely to effectively encourage your customers toward taking the action you want them to take.
Test, Test, Test
Hopefully, you’re engaging in fairly rigorous testing your traditional opt in email marketing campaigns before deploying them to your list – you are doing that, right? You need to take the same approach with the mobile platform. This is the only way to make sure that your links, as well as your marketing message as a whole, are in order. Don’t automatically assume that your email will look good on a BlackBerry just because it looks fine on an iPhone. By making a commitment to testing, you can ensure that your message displays well on all mobile platforms, whether they’re the latest smartphone or more low-tech devices that limited to receiving simple emails, text messages and phone calls.
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