You know that the trend is now towards mobile and the usage behaviour of your customers is constantly shifting towards mobile usage. This changed usage should make you rethink and adapt.

Today's blog article is about optimizing your email marketing for mobile use. To keep your email campaigns successful, you need to make sure they continue to be optimized for your customers. In the context of mobile usage, this means that emails must be "responsive".

With "Responsive Design", a website - or in our case an e-mail - is structured in such a way that the display or renderting automatically adapts to the screen size of the device received.

If your newsletter contents for the desktop view all fit together well, they may need to be arranged one below the other for the smartphone terminal. Paying attention to this and optimizing the emails or the newsletter to that effect is your chance to create a perfect responsive design and to be a clear step ahead of your competitors. Why the optimization is

so important for mobile use? I'm going to give you 5 reasons for this:

First Reason: The subject line

Starting with the first line of your e-mail or your newsletter, you must pay attention to the text layout optimized for mobile use. While you can choose a wonderfully long subject line for your desktop PC, you'll need to trim for the mobile version, otherwise the subject line will only be displayed halfway. I'll show you a simple example of what a subject could look like on a desktop PC and what would happen if it were cropped on a smartphone:

Desktop PC: Optimize your e-mail marketing campaign for the mobile use of your customers!

Mobile: Design Your Email Marketing ...

The full subject line will at best be interesting to your users on the desktops and they will open your email. Your e-mail campaign overcame the first hurdle and the mail does not end up in the trash. The truncated subject line in the mobile view is not inviting to open, and is less likely to be opened, perhaps even pushed directly into the trash.

In online marketing every detail has to be right, as your customers generally get offers from all sides in the net. At this point, the optimization for mobile use is still easy for you: Put in a short subject line in the mobile version!

Second reason: the resolution

Suppose you had no idea of responsive design and sent an e-mail to your customers that would not be optimized for mobile use. Then you probably would not have noticed the

resolution of this e-mail. If the width of your e-mail content were greater than 600 pixels, your customer would have to scroll from page to page because the content would be too wide for the mobile view. On the sides, the mail content would be unattractive and the view would be hardly user-friendly to your customers.

As best practice, the just mentioned width of 600 pixels has been established. This width is usually displayed completely on most webmail clients such as Gmail, Bluewin or

GMX, as well as in the previews of desktop programs such as Outlook, and should not be exceeded when creating e-mail content which should be responsive.

Third reason: links

Inserting links in your e-mail is an ideal tool to get your customers across to your products, on your blog, on your website or similar. However, only as long as the links and thus the buttons work well.

If your customers first have to click 10 times to catch the button because it is too small in the newsletter, for example, it can lead to frustration and the link will most likely not be used anymore.

To optimize for mobile use, you build finger-sized buttons, so they are usable for your users. For a concrete number of pixels, companies such as Miscrosoft recommend a width of nine millimetres for square buttons and a minimum height of seven millimetres for oblong buttons.

The size of the buttons for your e-mails can best be found out with tests for user experience. My tip: make the important buttons with Call to Action elements rather too big than too small to avoid a bad usability.

Fourth reason: different screen dimensions

Smartphones are available in various sizes. There has been an almost unmanageable number of screen dimensions in recent years. The widths range from 240 to 480 pixels.

How do you handle these big differences if you still want to optimize your email content for mobile use of your customers with different sized smartphone screens?

You also want to be prepared, for example, when a new version of a popular smartphone comes on the market, which may again have a new screen size. At least now you realize that you cannot just create a single newsletter and hope it's read by desktop PC users, iOS and Android users alike.

One option is the "Liquid" version of Responsive Design. While classic responsive design creates a static screen design for both the desktop and for different mobile variants, the Liquid Responsive Design adapts to the various screens of the end devices.

For example, images or design elements such as boxes or lines are dynamically scaled in width or height. For the mobile version in responsive design, the so-called media queries in the CSS style sheet are used to indicate the widths and orientation of the mobile device, for example, whether upright or across, the corresponding values should apply.

Fifth reason: Templates

Maybe you already have a library of templates, templates that you use to design your newsletters. With that you have made it easy and chose a clever way. It should be noted,

however, that these templates should have been developed according to the latest coding standards or should be updated according to them.

Often, there is no way around the implementation of an individual template, so that the presentation on all clients is technically possible and optimized. A complex code increases the demand on the developer, but also on the test runs and the maintenance.

Conclusion

Whether you are an ecommerce company generating revenue directly from emails, a B2B company sending personalized marketing proposals to get more leads or using your

newsletter to increase your brand awareness, you should look for optimized emails set for mobile usage.

E-mail marketing is an important sub-discipline of direct marketing and allows you direct contact with customers and prospects, but only as long as you ensure that your mails

can be read on your customers' smartphones.

Related Articles:

Mobile and Responsive Email Design: Optimization Tips

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