Making Your E-mail Marketing Mobile-Friendly

We all know that being mobile-friendly is an important part of being an eCommerce business. Google changed their search rankings algorithm on the 21st of April where a site’s mobile-friendliness impacts their rankings in search results. But being mobile-friendly is not just about your website. Sixty percent of e-mails are opened on a mobile device, according to Experian. If your e-mails don’t look right, it can cost you.

To help you make sure that your e-mails are not just getting to your customers, but also received well, here are some tips:

Break Up the Text

You know the drill when it comes to PowerPoint presentations: large blocks of text can easily scare your audience. A bulleted list, instead, can help to break up your content into smaller, more digestible chunks that are also friendlier to readers’ eyes. The same principle is true for your e-mails.

While e-mail is still the #1 way to connect with your customers, it’s not the place to write a blog post. Keep your paragraphs short and to the point, and use line breaks where appropriate. Images can be a great way to get a concept understood without having to write a big block of text.

There is one caveat to using images, though: some e-mail programs will automatically strip out images from e-mails. To make sure that your content is still understood, adding an ALT tag to the image will make sure that there is a line of text describing what the image is about. This will ensure your readers get the relevant information even if they don’t see the image itself.

Compress Your Images

Just like on your website, using large images—especially those that are large in file size—can pose big problems for your readers. Wi-Fi isn’t available everywhere, nor is fast mobile service, so imagine your e-mail is being downloaded over an old 56k modem connection. If your e-mail has a lot of high-res images that haven’t been compressed, chances are your e-mail won’t even load, let alone be read.

Be Careful with Emoji

Including pictures (emoji) in your subject line can make it very easy to grab the attention of your customers. But you need to be careful with just how and how often you use them.

Depending on your demographics, including emoji can instantly make you more relatable in the eyes of your customers. Or, it can make you look like you’re trying too hard. Just how you should use those little pictures will depend on who your target audience is, as well as a host of other factors.

Additionally, there are no standard emoji yet. Depending on the device on which your customer reads your e-mail, the emoji could work or be empty boxes. Because of this, don’t make your subject line depend on emoji to make sense, use them as accessories and enhancements.

Use a Responsive Template

A responsive template isn’t just good for your website, it’s also good for your e-mail messages. This is the easiest way to make sure that your message is consistent across devices. Just like with a responsive website, a responsive e-mail will adjust itself appropriately to fit whatever device on which your customer is reading your e-mail. Most modern browsers as well as smartphone mail apps can handle responsive templates with ease. (Gmail will actually re-format your e-mail for you on a mobile device if it doesn’t think it was originally optimized.)

As the years keep going by, and the percentages of mobile use keep rising, we need to focus more and more on mobile platforms. Making your messaging—both on your website and through e-mail—mobile-friendly ensures you don’t miss out on the valuable (& growing) mCommerce market.