I can almost guarantee, depending on sector and other broadcast
factors, that right now anywhere between 10% - 30% of email
subscribers are opening their messages on mobile devices such as
iPhones, iPads and Androids. This stat alone should prompt
marketers into thinking about making sure their emails are
displaying correctly and effectively on smaller screen sizes.
Fortunately this is where mobile optimisation and responsive design
come in.
First, here are some relevant stats to take into
account:
1. Consumers are viewing email campaigns on their
phones right now
- Since the end of Feb 2012 over 50% of all mobile phone usage in
the UK was carried out on smartphones. With smartphone users now
estimated to account for half of the UK population, there are
potentially over 26 million mobile email users.
- 84% of those users are on the mobile web browsing and checking
email on a regular basis
- Out of these 40% are using their mobile for email almost every
day
(Source: comScore Mobilens UK)
2. Users are not viewing email on multiple devices
- Recent reports show that users tend to view emails on one
device. This means in general marketers have one opportunity
to grab the users attention and get them to click through or save
for later.
3. Mobile usage is only increasing
-
Knotice Mobile Opens Report for the second half of 2011 shows
that the audience grew by 36% in just half a year
- This is also a trend confirmed by Litmus
here *obligatory infographic included
Before doing anything else brands should be testing their user
base to determine mobile open rates. This is generally a feature
provided by Email Service Providers or can be purchased on an adhoc
basis from email analytics providers like Litmus.
What do I mean by "Mobile Optimisation"?
One phrase that is doing the rounds in the context of website
development is "Responsive Design".
Essentially this is a technique used to control the way content
is displayed based on the size of the screen that displays it. For
example, you could have a newsletter that currently sits at a nice
600px width and has been designed to look good on a desktop PC.
What happens when that same design is compressed to fit on a small
hand held device such as a mobile phone or tablet?
In most cases the following issues will arise:
- The images are too big
- I have too much copy
- I cannot click on my CTAs easily
- I have to zoom in and out to see content clearly
- Suddenly I need to scroll horizontally as well as
vertically
Responsive design for email can help solve these problems and
improve the user experience on smaller screens by dynamically:
- Hiding content
- Changing font styling such as emphasis, size and colour
- Setting the zoom level to perfectly fill the entire width thus
removing horizontal scrolling
- Subtly changing content flow to support a single column
layout
- Plus many other effects
What I love about responsive design is that it enables us to
create one version of an email for both mobile and desktop. This
means we only need to create and setup one template, test it once
and input the content once. As responsive design works on screen
size and not on a per device basis there's no
need to create individual versions for iPhone, Android and
Blackberry etc. All of this helps save time and money in
implementation costs.
Finally, as an example of what mobile optimisation can look
like, here's one we made earlier at TMW for Nissan
GB:
Within this you can see that the width of the email has reduced
to fit a mobile screen, certain unrequired content has been hidden
to free up space and that copy has shifted to a single column
layout.
This article was first published on Econsultancy.