Just one strong marketing email can take a considerable amount of work — creating great subject lines, body copy and calls-to-action is no small task. You might be sending top-notch marketing emails already, but if you don’t take extra steps to make sure they perform on mobile, you could be failing to reach your audience. Research from MovableInk finds that 66 percent of emails are now read on a smartphone or tablet, and according to research from Litmus, 69 percent of mobile users delete emails that aren’t optimized for the platform.
If you want to meet consumers where they are and reach them effectively, it’s worth putting in the time to make sure your emails will perform on mobile. Here are three quick tips for optimizing your marketing emails for mobile.
1. Be concise
This is an important practice for email marketing in general, but it’s especially key when it comes to mobile optimization. Being concise goes for both your subject line and your body text. A subject line that’s too long will get cut off on mobile, and according to research from Yes Lifecycle Marketing, emails with shorter subject lines tend to get higher open and click rates.
Once they’ve opened it, your recipient might only give your email a quick scroll and a few seconds, so don’t waste any time getting to your message. Since people likely won’t read your email in its entirety, order your content by importance.
While you want to get to the point, you don’t need to write like a robot. Find a balance between a conversational tone and hitting all the key points you want your email to make.
2. Go big with your CTA
Your call-to-action, or CTA of your email is a short statement designed to get your audience to do something, telling them what concrete next steps to take. Examples include “click for more,” “buy now,” or “shop the deal” — you get it.
Since mobile users are reading your email on a smaller screen, you want to make sure your call to action clearly stands out. You can do this by making the font size larger or adding color to the CTA text to make it pop. Even better is making your CTA a button rather than just hyperlinked text, since buttons are bigger and easier to click on for smartphone users. Be careful of going overboard with colors or font sizes — just do enough so that the CTA is clear and eye-catching. As a general rule, it’s good to also place your CTA as far up in the email as you can. If your reader has to scroll for more than a couple seconds to see it, they’ll probably miss it.
3. Properly size images
Research from Hubspot shows that 65 percent of users like emails that are mostly made up of images, with just 35 percent preferring text-heavy emails. The fact is that compelling images can do a lot to draw in your email recipients, keeping them interested in your message for longer. But if your images are too big to quickly load, you’ll drive your audience away.
Sizing images properly for mobile users generally means reducing file sizes so that phones can process them fast enough. There are a number of tools out there for reducing image sizes including ImageOptim, www.jpegmini.com and tinypng.com.
Before sending your optimized emails out to subscribers, always test them out on a mobile device to mitigate any possible errors. How do you make sure your emails perform? Let us know in the comments!
Photo: Anete Lusina
