Go Mobile: Optimize Your Emails for Success

When is the last time you checked your email? Was it on your phone? Chances are, it was — and you are not alone. Half of all emails are opened on mobile devices and, what’s more, a substantial number of people will delete emails that are not easily read on their phones. Yet, the majority of email marketers are not capitalizing on this opportunity and have not optimized their emails for mobile viewing. This disconnect from mobile users is undoubtedly costing companies money.

Bottom line? If you are not optimizing your emails for mobile, you are losing out on potential conversions.

You don’t have to leave opportunities on the table, though! Read on for several easy ways to make your marketing emails more mobile-friendly.

Font Size

Be aware that Apple devices will automatically resize fonts smaller than 12 pts to 12 pts, which could inadvertently break email designs and wrap text differently than intended. Therefore, for the most optimal display ensure your font size is set to 14 pts for body copy and at least 22pts for headlines.

Layout

Two or three-column email layouts look great on computers, but not all mobile clients will display a multi-column layout (notably, Android). The best way to ensure your emails are seen in their entirety is to use a one-column layout, stack content vertically, not horizontally, and keep your width to a maximum of 640 pixels.

 Responsive Design

Responsive design is something we all need to be considering. Responsive design is a web design approach that ensures emails and webpages can be easily viewed across all devices. If you, or someone on your team, is not familiar with coding, it may be easiest to utilize already-created responsive templates. If you are interested in using responsive templates, read this Mashable article to learn more.

 Image Size

No one wants to wait for a slow-loading email, especially on a mobile phone. In fact, according to this article, every 1 second delay in load time can result in a 7% drop in conversion. Shorten your emails’ load time by using smaller image files.

 CTA Buttons

Even if your website is not yet mobile-optimized, you still want customers to be able to easily click through your email from their mobile device. That means clicking with fingers and thumbs. To ensure the CTA buttons are large enough, make them a minimum of 57 x 57 pixels. Also be sure to space apart these buttons to discourage accidental clicking.

I hope these five points help you as you begin the process of optimizing your emails for mobile viewing. I found many of these, and more, as I was researching best practices for mobile optimization for our company. Stay tuned and keep opening those 123Print emails because we will be optimizing our emails for mobile viewing soon!

Are your emails optimized for mobile? We’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment below or on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.