Mobile Email Optimisation For Beginners

Posted on Jun 25th 2014 in Mobile

Email opens on mobile devices have soared from just 11% in 2011, to a steady 45% of all email opens in 2014.

As email opens on mobile grow and grow, desktop and webmail opens are rapidly falling, leaving email marketers who want to reach their audience no choice but to hop on the mobile train, or get left behind.

But what does it actually take to optimise for mobile? As with every kind of marketing technique, working with mobile is all about knowing your audience and designing a strategy around their needs.

What Does Mobile Mean for Your Resort?

Delve into your analytics and remind yourself of the behaviours and preferences of your audience – how many of them are viewing your emails from mobile devices? How often? Which email programs are they using?

Every audience is different, and you should concentrate your testing and optimisation efforts on the platforms and devices the bulk of your guests are using. Once you’ve identified how they’re accessing your email content, take time to investigate the design nuances of the most used platforms and devices. If the majority of your guests favour Outlook for example, it’s best to avoid using background images in your emails because they are not supported on the platform.

Mobile Email Optimisation Best Practices

Around 80% of readers will delete an email if it doesn’t display correctly on their mobile device.

The best practices below will ensure your emails are attractive and easy to read not only on Smartphones, but on tablets and desktop platforms too.

1) Ditch Small Fonts

Text that is too small to read without squinting is frustrating enough on a desktop computer, let alone a tiny mobile screen. To make sure your guests can actually read what you have to say, we recommend going no lower than 14px for the body copy of your emails and no lower than 22px for headlines.

2) Keep Content Concise

The more concise the content, the easier it is for people to consume on the move using their mobile devices. Assess your email and be ready to remove any copy, links or images that are not strictly necessary to the message you’re trying to communicate to your audience. On mobile, short and sweet wins every time.

3) Avoid Multi-Column Layouts

If your current guest newsletter design features a multi-column format, switching to a single-column approach will help make it more mobile-friendly. You should also remove any detailed navigation bars from your emails – these are prone to break and tend to be difficult to use on a smaller screen.

4) Keep It Touch-Friendly

Every effective marketing email requires a call-to-action, and in mobile emails, these CTAs need to be touch-friendly. Once again you want to avoid making anything too small or fiddly to interact with. Keep your CTA at least 44px x 44px and make sure you leave appropriate space between links so subscribers can easily ‘touch’ select the CTA they’re most interested in.

5) Beat Automated Image-Blocking

Many mobile email apps block images by default, so it’s crucial to design your emails so that they will display correctly both with and without images.

One of the best ways to combat automated image-blocking is by using ALT text to offer a written alternative to the graphical image. This will help provide some context and coherency for readers that are unable to view images via their desktop or mobile email clients – all you need to do is add an ALT text attribute to the image tag.

What other best practices does your resort follow to optimise emails for your mobile audience? Let us know in the comments below!