With the growing popularity of the Email Marketing tool
built into the OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Platform, we wanted to share
some tips and best practices and on how to present a great email marketing
campaign. Parts one, two and three of the series focused on Text-to-ImageBalance, Remarketing, and Formatting to Support Calls to Action. This final
installment touches on Optimizing Email Campaigns for Mobile.
#4 Optimizing Email
Campaigns for Mobile
With smartphone and tablet usage rapidly increasing on a
daily basis, a focus on mobile commerce with the formulation of mobile websites
and apps has followed suit. However, many marketers fail to address the necessity
for an update to their email campaigns for mobile devices, which would seem
like a no-brainer in the process of promoting mobile shopping. According to
Return Path’s report Email in Motion: Mobile
is Leading the Email Revolution, 30% of all emails are opened on mobile
devices, and mobile will overtake desktop for email readership by the end of
2012. Yet, 48% of marketers are completely unaware of how many mobile users
subscribe to their brand, leaving them unprepared to capitalize on mobile
revenue.
Return Path’s report states two other important things: 56%
of past US smartphone shoppers have done so as a result of clicking through an
email on their mobile phone, while 63% of Americans and 41% of Europeans will
delete emails on their phones if they have not been optimized for mobile
reading. How do you bridge the gap and get your email campaign read regardless
of where it is received?
Keep it simple. This is ideal for both desktop and mobile
email clients. With short attentions spans, it’s important to efficiently deliver
necessary information, in any case. Utilize a descriptive subject (50
characters or less) that summarizes the email well enough that if the
reader decides not to open it on their mobile device, they are intrigued enough
to keep it for desktop viewing later, rather than delete it altogether. The use of images should be kept to a minimum,
and they should be input with ALT
text since images may either not load, or be too large to be viewed on
small mobile screens. It’s also a good
idea to provide a link to a mobile version of the email that has no images.
Below are the desktop and mobile versions of an email campaign from the same
company, as viewed on a mobile device.
Remember the thumbs. Fingers
and thumbs on a small screen can be inconvenient, especially if the reader is
in a hurry. The best emails are short emails – if the user has to scroll
through your email on a mobile device, their thumb could end up blocking their
view of parts of the email. Have you ever tried to click on a link while on
your smartphone only to find you’ve clicked on something entirely different
than you intended? Keep that in mind when designing click-through links by
spacing them out well, and offering a comfortable size for the click-through
buttons or text, like the way the email below uses large clickable sections.
The Blue
Fountain Media blog featured a post offering some specs for good email
campaigns, touting that emails should be no larger than 600px, and header and
body fonts should be 30pt and 14pt, respectively, as Apple devices will enlarge
and wrap smaller text that will warp email designs, making them harder to read.
As the Email in Motion report mentions
that iPads account for 85% of mobile email readership, that’s some good advice.
And that “comfortable size” for click-through buttons mentioned above – Blue Fountain
says “comfortable” is 44px.
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OrderDynamics Guide to Email Marketing
Part 1 - Finding the Text-to-Image Balance
Part 4 - Optimizing Email Campaigns for Mobile
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