Two quick questions:
Do you often use your smartphone to check email? And do you delete many of them because they are plain ugly and unreadable?
I won’t be surprised if you said yes to both.
Let’s look at some numbers
- Morgan Stanley predicts that mobile devices will globally outsell desktops and laptops by the end of 2012.
- Ericsson states that by 2017 there will be 9 billion mobile devices– more than the number of people on earth.
- According to research by Tricom B2B and University of Dayton School of Business Administration 59% of US B2B decision makers used a smartphone to gather information.
- See this data from a Google survey called “Think B2B: Connecting with the Customer”:
Properly done, email marketing is still one of the best ways to reach out cheaply and effectively to decision makers, especially in B2B.
But there are still a lot of marketers out there who are making mobile users want to poke their eyes out by sending them emails designed for viewing on larger laptop and desktop screens.
That’s like melting a candle, pouring the wax into your car’s gas tank and expecting to hear the engine start when you turn the key.
These are the 10 reasons why your mobile email campaigns might be losing you money
1. Your subject lines are long
Mobile users will be able to see only a limited amount of text in the subject line before it gets truncated. Make sure readers get the gist of your email in 38 to 47 characters. You know, kind of like “Pharmacy Store: Viagra + Cialis”.
And they said spammers were scum!
2. Your From field is unknown
On some devices, users might see the From fields more prominently that the subject lines. In either case you should have something familiar to your reader, like the name of your brand, in your Form field.
3. Your mails go on and on and on
Mobile devices will truncate the content after a specific number of characters. Ruthlessly cut out everything that might be extraneous and get straight to the point. Put the call to action button very prominently and upfront.
4. Your emails are hard to read
The optimum font size on an email for mobile is 30 pt for headlines and 14 pt for body text. Make it smaller and text will be illegible, or the layout will get out of whack because of font resizing.
Use whitespace appropriately, and use high contrast color palettes so that dim screens and harsh sunlight doesn’t affect readability.
5.Your templates are not mobile friendly
Most smartphones are around 320 px wide in portrait mode. Since only iOS devices zoom to fit the content into screen real estate, and users hate horizontal scrolling ensure your emails are designed for the appropriate width.
Designing your templates on the basis of a grid should also solve a lot of layout problems.
6. There are too many design elements
Navigation bars, multiple columns, links stacked closely on top of each other all mess up the user experience. Instead of a clean, free flowing email that’s easy on the eyes readers are confronted by a bunch of misaligned links and scrunched together text.
Ugh! Your reader, you and I don’t want to read that.
7. Your emails are image heavy
Images in emails are never a good idea because most mobile devices block them by default, and an image loading slowly on a flaky network is never good. If you need to use images, provide appropriate alt-text. Preview text should also be used for any HTML links that you embed in your email.
8. You haven’t designed for touch
On a mobile device, users don’t click using cursors, they tap buttons.Buttons need to be designed for big thumbs. Align them ergonomically so that users are not forced to use another hand to tap them. Make sure the standard UI elements in the mobile OS don’t obscure the buttons.
9. You don’t test your emails physically
You don’t need to test for all mobile devices on the market, but you need to know how users will view your email on at the top 3 mobile platforms. Analytics data and embedded tracking codes can give you an idea of the kinds of devices and platforms the majority of your readers use.
10. The landing page is not mobile friendly
Even if you take care of all these issues your mobile campaign can stumble because the landing page which is linked to the call to action is not optimized for mobile. Design the landing page in such a way that the number of button taps needed to convert is kept at a minimum.
Conclusion
Check out this infographic from Litmus on how to create a perfect email that gets read on mobile
