How to Optimize Your Email Newsletter for Mobile
Published on April 27, 2016
Mobile isn’t actually the next fantastical frontier for digital marketing anymore; It’s the everyday reality. Optimizing your brand’s marketing efforts for mobile is key, whether your campaign’s focus is on social, SEO, or even email marketing.
But wait, you may be asking yourself, do that many people really check their inbox on a mobile device? Millions do, and with the rise of new technologies, mobile open rates are still growing constantly. In fact, the percentage of emails opened on mobile devices jumped up more than 500% between 2011 and 2014, from a mere 8% to 53%, according to Forbes.
Need another staggering statistic to convince you that mobile optimization is a colossal deal? In a study by BlueHornet, more than 80% of email marketing subscribers report that they will delete an email if it doesn’t look good on their mobile device.
Email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing techniques at your disposal, and now is the time to expand your audience by reaching their tablets and smartphones.
Here are five easy ways to optimize your email newsletter for mobile:
1.) Use Larger Fonts
No one wants to read through tiny text on a desktop, and that goes double for mobile. Make sure your font is clear and easy to read without forcing your users to zoom in (since the reality is that most won’t, and will instead just abandon your email without reading your great copy). For more readable fonts, Hubspot recommends using 14 px or higher for your body copy, and 22 px or higher for headlines.
2.) Choose Your Content Carefully
Streamlining your content is extremely important for mobile-friendliness. Only include your very best content, and be willing to jettison the rest (including less useful or important links, copy, and images). Condensing your newsletter down to its most concise form will allow for easier scrolling on mobile, and the smaller file size means your newsletter will load faster.
3.) Streamline Your Column Layout
Using as few columns as possible will help ensure a more mobile-friendly layout. Single columns look cleaner and more legible on smaller screens, and the detailed navigation bars that often make up a column can easily break or prove too small to use on mobile. If you have a two column (or more!) layout on the desktop, make it stack column on column in your mobile layout.
4.) Make Your Buttons Large and Touch-Friendly
In addition to ditching or streamlining your clunky navigation bar, it’s important to make your other clickable elements – particularly your Call to Action – large, simple to find, and, well, clickable. Make sure your buttons are responsive and large enough to touch easily – we recommend a minimum of 44 px by 44 px.
5.) Shorten Your Subject Lines
According to this study by Experian, shorter subject lines led to more unique open rates, with the highest rates coming from subject lines using fewer than 25 characters. This is a good lesson for writers in general. In email marketing and mobile design, brevity really is the soul of clicks (except for when you need to work in a sweet Shakespeare reference like that one).
Have any more questions about the future of digital marketing? Ready to launch a content marketing campaign that is mobile optimized across the spectrum? That’s where we come in! Drop Geek a line for all of your social media, email marketing, and web design needs today!
