Email Marketing 2015 - Email Marketing Mobile

It may seem a bit of over placing Email Marketing Mobile as a priority for 2015, as this is a subject that has been discussed for a long time. One may say that an email marketing program can no longer disregard the emails openings on mobile devices, so if you want to start with an email program this year, plan from the beginning to prioritize smaller screens, such as smartphones.

If you still think that email marketing mobile isn’t all that. take a look at these numbers:

Convinced? Just think a bit about how you do on a daily basis. How many email messages you open and reply by phone? How many times have you had troubles reading an email because it was not optimised? Smartphones are with people pretty much all day and email is one of the most customizable and assertive ways to get in touch with your audience. They seem made for each other.

What is the best approach for my message?

Despite the importance of mobile strategy being consolidated, marketers, designers and developers sometimes are still lost in the midst of acronyms, approaches and code. With the absence of such standards, it is difficult to understand what options are available and which way to go. So, first, you need to understand what is what and then choose the best approach. Recently, the staff of Action Rocket made a very important post differing styles of mobile email. Let’s use their categorization:

The options Mobile Friendly and Narrow are the simplest options and can offer a good experience for your contacts, although they are not devised primarily for those devices. If you still don’t want to invest a lot of time and resources on emails, they might be good choices.

The best option for the moment is the hybrid because it allows email to be correctly displayed both in clients that support Media Queries as well as those that do not support, such as Gmail, offering the most complete experience, regardless of where the email is opened. Gmail is one of the main reasons why the responsive approach may not be widely used yet: since it takes all styles present in the tag off your template, Media Queries don’t work.

The same tip from the video post fits here: find out what is the email client and operating system on which your contacts are opening your messages the most, to help you know which strategy to invest more.

If building responsive emails from scratch is not in the plans of your company, opt for models: Mailee offers ready-made, responsive and customizable templates, in which you can insert and delete blocks of text and image. Websites like ZURB also offer free templates that you can adapt for your messages.

In case you prefer to build your own templates, we recommend the following resources to help you in this task:

Creating a responsive pattern from scratch: Litmus tutorial.
Ready-made responsive Emails from Responsive Email Patterns.
Responsive design in 7 easy steps at Email on Acid.
How to create editable areas and repetition blocks on Mailee.

Regardless from the approach you choose or the kind of email you are going to send for your contacts, there is a rule that always fits: Always test! Email Clients have a lot of peculiarities and may show the same message in several different ways.