This article was originally posted on the QVew Tips site, for use by clients of QVew, an on-demand platform for mobile/social marketing.
Smartphone sales have overtaken feature phone sales, which in turn overtook laptop and PC sales years ago. Every year that gap widens. Almost everyone with an email account reads it on the go for at least part of each day, and some days the only device available is the mobile phone. For decision makers, the mobile device is the weapon of choice. Remember, however, than for every smartphone owner consuming our gorgeous new multimedia phone messages, there are still just as many feature-phone owners who get email mainly as enhanced text or HTML. The moral: design your email messages to suit all mobile readers if you want good results. Here are a few considerations. As usual, I’ve included some resource links at the end of this post.
1. Header fields (Sender and Subject)
On the small screen, it’s even more crucial to clearly identify yourself and your organization in the Sender and Subject field. People often set their mobile devices to receive only header info, or they’ll visually scan the first few lines of a message before deciding which messages are worth their time. It’s the electronic equivalent of sorting your postal mail while standing at the wastebasket. Ever done that? Thought so. Effective Sender and Subject information will vastly improve your open rate.
The Sender field should have a human’s name in it and/or your business name, if you are a business. Example: ”Jane Doe | XYZ Corp.” The Subject field gets a succinct headline (40 characters max) front-loaded to convey the main benefits to the reader. If you have more than one subject, consider sending a separate message for each, unless you can weave multiple subjects into a single theme to fit that brief 40-character Subject line. According to Epsilon, who have tested millions of emails for the world’s largest companies, the top factor in improving email open rates is a short, sweet, front-loaded subject line – one that has been a/b tested.
Avoid gimmicks. Example: the “re:” gimmick spoof. The “re:” tag indicates a forwarded message – NOT one originated by you. Gaming the audience’s inbox in this way is actually a frequent scammer / phishing tactic. You don’t want that reputation. ”nuf said.
2. Top of message body: Text, not Graphics
If you follow these 3 rules, you’ll stay out of the weeds: (1) don’t make me think; (2) don’t make me wait; (3) don’t make me work. Avoid placing graphics in the upper left corner of your message body. Use that valuable piece of real estate for an impactful text message. Get to the point quickly, so your readers can begin benefiting right away. Conversely, leading your message body with a graphic instead of text can cause confusion and delay reading. Users of devices set to text-only who hav eclicked your juicy headline don’t want to find a blank screen (graphic placeholder). Graphics-enabled users don’t want to see a tiny upper left corner of an oversized graphic – also very confusing. Interrupting busy people’s “flow” or confusing them with guesswork will result in fewer opens, clicks and conversions, and more deletes and unsubscribes. Best practice: lead with text, minimize use of graphics, and shrink the graphics to button size, thumbnail size, or narrow banner. If your graphic is so large that no text is visible on-screen, shrink it. If your graphic loooks too tiny when shrunk to small-screen size, design a new graphic that works.
3. Navigation and Conversion
Limit navigation complexity. Width: between 450 and 600 pixels is ideal, to minimize horizontal scrolling. Use a single column format, not a multi-column newsletter format. Opt for using screen-width-percentage tags rather than absolute pixel width, so your messages format on the fly to fit a myriad of device screens. Height: If possible, limit it to just minimal scrolling (max: one additional screen’s worth of content below the visible screen of content). If you include a data capture form, avoid multiple required fields. Just capture the bare minimum information to advance to the next level in your relationship with the reader. Do you really need their mailing address if you already have their email address? If the answer is still yes, then start by asking for just zip code if you do location-based business. QR codes are great for this purpose; NFC (near-field communication) is just starting to show up in devices and points of sale.
4. Call to Action (CTA) links
Support your main topic or offer with both buttons and text links. Some people prefer to click buttons; others will click text links. Satisfy both camps. Be sure your link supports the Subject line of the message. Clearly state any time-limited offers or timeliness of the message to inject urgency. Make your action button large enough so it can be reached by the outstretched thumb of those one-handed gadget-slingers.
Spacing of buttons and links is also important. Buttons work great on smaller mobile touch screens because they can be larger than text and thus work better when fingertips navigate small touch screens. Consider separating each text and button link by at least a line of text or equivalent blank space, to help our fat fingers navigate effectively and avoid annoying misfires that send us into oblivion, waiting for an ulttimately errant download.
Equally important: send your recipients to mobile-optimized landing pages. Mobile-optimized means everything mentioned in this article. Optimizing your website for mobile may mean providing alternate navigation – especially if your main website menu is of the horizontal drop-down type; they can cause fat-finger misfires.
5. Alt text tags
Every graphic element can have an alt text tag. Think of Alt text tags as a “Subject” tag or action phrase describing its graphic element. These tags are becoming increasingly important as we see telecom carriers tweak their data plan pricing. Expect more users to set their devices to download the text-only messages first, then decide to download graphics or view video based on the text and alt tags. Write a compelling Alt text label for each graphic element and Action button in your message. Your tags will still appear in a text-only message in place of the graphic, to let readers know what they’ll receive if they decide to download the graphic version. Moreover, HTML 5 will let those alt tag fields function as live links – without downloading the graphic element – which is great for busy people who don’t want to pay or wait for the graphics, so use the Alt tag to help people decide when and what to click.
6. Visual text/graphics balance – the 80/20 rule rides again
At least 80% of your message should be text with text links, and no more than 20% clickable graphics. This helps make certain your full message gets across quickly even if it’s the text-only version, and it ensures fast, successful downloads for people who want the full visual message. Even 4G mobile download speeds are generally slower than desktop device speeds. In fact, a good acid test is to first compose your email as a text-only version, to be sure that your entire message and action links are visually appealing, tell the complete story, and generate a response.
7. Social Media Buttons: Share or Snare?
If you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other complementary accounts that might help readers get to know you better, include those link buttons. If you opt for social “sharing” buttons, place them prominently alongside content your audience might wish to share. Caution: while it’s magnanimous to provide social “share’ buttons so viewers can share your email with others, experience has shown that email readers generally would rather get more info themselves to facilitate a decision before they decide to share it. With this in mind, it is actually more effective to have your social media buttons link to additional information to facilitate buying decisions. Your own circumstances may vary; it is best to A/B test the social sharing / snaring button to determine which has best effect for your audience. Above all, don’t “mix” the buttons. They should either be all “share” or all “snare”, to avoid user confusion.
8. Consider using cascading style sheets (CSS).
CSS can help detect and change the size of image and text to comfortably fit different sized device screens.
9. Testing alone gets 82% more revenue!
At Fan Foundry, we have discovered that our lifetime conversion rates exceed industry norms simply because we test our messages. We have an 82% higher lifetme conversion rate across all client campaigns, based on comparison to performance reports from prominent email marketing software providers. Does this mean that until email testing becomes more standard practice, you too can get 82% more revenue from your email marketing simply by testing? Possibly. Try it!
Send a test email to your own mobile email reader – or as broad a variety of email readers as possible – to check for visual appeal and link performance. Some of the more sophisticated marketing automation software products actually have this testing feature built-in. Test a different subject line; a different graphic; a different CTA button; etc. After all the hard work you’ve done to create your gorgeous, compelling email outreach campaigns and acquire a faithful audience, the few minutes spent testing gives your marketing ROI significant lift. Wouldn’t you like to earn 1.82 times your ordinary revenue? Well, then, test. Conversely, if you ignore this step and send an error-laden email, don’t be surprised if people begin to ignore you and your results suffer. Don’t be that person! Make it count, grow your audience and build loyalty!
What has your experience been? Any tips to share? I’ll add them here and credit you. Or you can discuss below, or just ask a question.
Related articles
- Images Disabled? No Problem! (aweber.com)
- Anatomy of the Perfect Mobile Email (Infographic) (Styleacampaign.com)
- Mobile marketing graphics: Link Buttons (fanfoundry)
- Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 (W3C)
Posted by Ed 
