In the world of email marketing, it’s amazing just how much as evolved over the last couple of years.
Even we were surprised to learn that 51% of all emails are now opened on mobile devices. (Source: Litmus: Email Testing and Email Marketing Analytics ) What does this mean when it comes to planning your email marketing campaigns?
You need to think about mobile FIRST.
The solution? Responsive email design. Which will look good and be effective on both mobile and desktop clients alike. We still see a lot of emails only being built with traditional email clients in mind. They look great in most desktop email clients, but they usually are very image heavy and not all that reader friendly when it comes to viewing on mobile devices. Image heavy campaigns also limit the way your user can interact with your email.
This is all old news to industry experts, but sometimes it can be confusing. So we wanted to share exactly what responsive email design is.
The basic premise: Content will resize and optimize itself based on the device it is being viewed on.
Your content will render
differently when it comes to desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. The fonts will size accordingly, images will adapt to the maximum screen resolution, and other elements will drop in line while scaling accordingly.
To give you an idea of how the layout changes:
It makes the text easier to read on mobile devices, the links and buttons easier to click, and it reduces the need to zoom or vertically scroll.
That’s not it though, it’s really been proven to be more effective overall. Some of the other advantages of responsive design are:
-Increased open & click through rates/ROI.
-Doesn’t rely on image content that’s hidden if a user has display images turned off.
-Fewer unsubscribes.
-Better user experience.
-The ability to hide specific elements for mobile-only optimization.
-You can also better control the email data size. (Live text is smaller in size than images)
-It will set you apart from the competition.
As you can see there are a lot of possibilities with email marketing out there now. Audiences have moved over to mobile platforms, which should also now be the focus of your campaigns too.
