Creating Mobile Friendly Emails

Close to 70% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Are your email messages mobile-friendly? It’s now a must-have. Here are a few tips on how to make your messages more mobile-friendly.

 7 Simple Tips to Make Your Email More Mobile Friendly

1. Keep Subject Lines Short: A mobile phone screen shows between 25~30 characters of an email’s subject line. Compare this to around 60 on a desktop. Keeping your subject lines short will make it easier for your mobile recipients to have a clear idea what your email’s about. Not sure how many of your email campaign recipients are on mobile? Your email marketing software has analytics to let you know this kind of stuff. Not using email marketing software? Time to get started with that . . .
2. Put Your Snippet Text to Work: These are also known as “Email Preheaders”. Most email software will pull a few lines of text from your email message, or pull it from the ALT description of an image. This information should be a follow up to your subject line and give the reader another reason to open your email.
3. Keep Design Simple: A single column design is going to work best on a small screen. If you go to two columns, chances are you recipients are going to have to scroll or zoom. Anything you do that makes things more difficult for your recipients will reduce readership and ROI. Sticking with a single column template will make your email message more easily viewed on all screen sizes.
4. Avoid Small Fonts: Something that looks good on a computer screen can be illegible on a mobile screen. At a minimum you should be thinking of 14pt fonts for your body text. Headlines should be at least 22pt. Don’t make your recipients have to zoom to read your message. They won’t, and your campaign results will suffer.
5. Limit the Use of Images: We touched on this in yesterday’s post about all-image messages but overall, using less images is generally beneficial. When (not if) your images are blocked, your message will still have lots of text and other immediately accessible information for your readers to view. If you’re going to use images, make sure you use ALT text to show people what the image is even if it isn’t displayed. Also make sure your images are well optimized so they’ll load faster for everyone.
6. Use Strong Contrasting Colours: I know, this isn’t rocket science level advice but I’m amazed at the number of messages I receive where contrast is low. Simple black on white is the best. Keep in mind that mobile phones are used in a variety of lighting situations so keeping contrast strong will give you the highest readability overall.
7. Use Call To Actions Simple: What do you want visitors to do? Buy something? Visit your website? Have that Call to Action (CTA) link simple, large, and easy to find. Most people use an image of a button for their CTA, which can be bad if a recipient’s email software doesn’t display images automatically. If you decide to go this route, make sure you use an ALT tag to let your viewers know what is represented in that image’s broken link.

There you have it – 7 easy ways you can make your email messages more mobile friendly. What do you think? Can you implement these in your email marketing campaigns? Are you already doing so? Leave us a note below and let us know how these tips are working for you!

Thank you for reading today’s email marketing tip. Please stay tuned for more practical advice in tomorrow’s post!