Anatomy of the Perfect Mobile Email
74% of smartphone owners use their phones to check email on a daily basis, according to Gartner. More than 5% of emails are opened through mobile phones, a figure that drops to 31% if the openings are on the computer. About 70% of users delete email messages that are not optimized for mobile. But less than 25% of companies integrate mobile into their email marketing strategies. These 4 basic data show the importance of taking care of your messages so that they are displayed properly on mobile phones and tablets.
The growing popularity of smartphones also forces email marketing to adapt to new mobile devices. More and more users are accessing their email accounts through their smartphones. And by changing the access device, the format of the emails inevitably changes. In order to connect with the customer through smartphones, emails must follow the following guidelines:
1. Write a concise and striking subject. If this is already a maxim for any email campaign that seeks conversion, on a smartphone its importance is almost decisive. Some studies relate subject brevity to openings and conclude that subjects between 4 and 15 characters have the highest open rates. If you can't be as concise, try to keep the subject line less than 45 characters long.
2.Take care of the sender. Interestingly, email applications on mobile show who is sending them first. Showing a familiar name that gives the user confidence can open the doors of reading it.
3. Forget about the navigation bars. Are you sure you need to distract your users' attention? If even so, you think it is important to keep navigating, leave only the value buttons and offer them in a size large enough so that they do not make a mistake when clicking on them.
4. Increase the size of the fonts. A headline must have a font size greater than 22 pixels. In addition, although the minimum size in IOS is 13 pixels, it is recommended that the content of the message has a size of 14 to 16 pixels if you want to avoid that users have to zoom in on the email.
5. Keep an email width between 320 and 550 pixels. This way you ensure that it will look good in almost all mobile email management programs, regardless of whether or not they scale the email.
6. Adopt the single column format to guarantee an excellent experience for your user. Think that the screen is small enough to try to avoid layouts with 2 or 3 columns, more common in traditional emails. A single column format offers better readability.
7. Place the call to action on a large, centered button. Don't worry about it looking too big. You should think more about "swipes" and "taps" than "clicks" since the mobile is operated with the fingers. A button larger than 44 × 44 pixels is recommended. It is essential that the main buttons are at the user's hand. Remember that we usually take the mobile with one hand and handle the contents with the other. For this reason, you must take exquisite care to ensure that calls to action are easily accessible to your subscribers.
8. Do not focus everything on the value of an image since email managers on mobile devices also block images, many of them by default. If you don't want your email to look blank, use the images carefully. Also, they shouldn't be heavy.
9. Less is more. You do not want to tell everything on a screen because the only thing you will achieve is that it is stained with content and none of them stand out. In addition, it is interesting to respect the classic philosophy of hierarchical content whose mantra is that the most important thing must come first. And forget about multi-line descriptions. Try to highlight the fundamentals in 2-3 lines at the most.
10. Use creativity so that the user knows what he has to do. On a mobile screen you cannot do many things that we are used to when we use a mouse. Therefore, it is convenient to highlight the links and buttons so that it is clear that you must click on them.
11. Increase the size of the spacing. Just as it is important to maintain a large font size, the same happens with the space between the different elements, which must be designed for all types of fingers.
12. Don't confuse your calls to action with the navigation buttons of each mobile operating system. The user is used to the usability of their mobile and will stop seeing the buttons that can lead to the conversion.