If you are in digital marketing, it’s hard to miss the major shift occurring in the way that people access the internet. When online marketing began, the desktop computer was the only portal through which consumers accessed the internet. Today, 77% of Americans own a smartphone, and desktop is no longer the primary way people get online. We can now safely say that we are living in a mobile-first world.
For online marketers, this means that there has to be a shift toward mobile marketing. If you are still basing your strategies on the outdated desktop model, you are going to fall behind the competition and lose the interest of today’s mobile-focused consumer.
While this shift is going to have an impact on every component of your online marketing strategy, email marketing is one area where the effects are going to be significant. According to analysis from Litmus, 47% of emails are opened on mobile devices while only about 17% are opened through desktop. With numbers like those, it is clear that mobile email now has to be one of the key considerations for every campaign.
As mobile web marketing continues to grow in importance, email marketers will need to make some adjustments. Here are a few tips for how businesses can optimize their mobile email design and continue to get those high returns that we have come to expect from email marketing.
Shorten Your Subject Lines
The subject line plays an important role in getting people to open mobile emails. About 47% of recipients decide whether to open an email based on the subject alone.
While this is true for both desktop users and mobile internet users, the prevalence of mobile technology means that you need to account for the way subject lines appear to your mobile email clients. On desktop, the recipient could see 80 characters or more of the subject line. When it comes to optimizing email for mobile, the best practice is to go with one that is 30 characters or less.
Mobile Friendly Email Templates
Not only is the mobile interface smaller, mobile email design is also displayed differently than desktop email. If you want to get strong engagement numbers and good click-through rates, you have to optimize email for mobile.
This means using a mobile-friendly email template. You need to cut the width of emails down to less than 550 pixels, increase font size, and add larger buttons that are easier to press on small screens.
Mobile Ready Landing Pages
Once you adjust your mobile email design, you should see an increase in click-through rates; but this is only the beginning of the recipient’s journey. You are directing the customer to a page where you hope they will take further action.
If you want to have success with your mobile web marketing plan, you need to design landing pages that display well on the small screen. If the recipient clicks through only to find a page that is hard to read or difficult to interact with, you will lose a visitor that showed clear interest by clicking through.
Read more from ZoomInfo: 7 Ways to Optimize Your Lead Generation Landing Pages
Make Emails Shorter
Shorter mobile emails tend to see better click-through rates than longer ones. While this is also true for desktop versions, it is even more important for mobile email.
Smartphone users typically do not want to spend a lot of time reading a long email on the small screen. If an email is too long, people are more likely to close it before reading it, and there is no guarantee that a user will go back to open it on a different device.
Some best practices to keep in mind here are: Try to reduce the amount of text in your mobile email design, make the content scannable, and highlight your CTAs and brand message.
Test Everything to Optimize Your Email for Mobile
If you want email to be an effective part of your mobile marketing strategy, you need to test and analyze the results. Try out different subject lines, images, delivery times, landing pages, and CTAs.
Following best practices for mobile email design is a good start, but to truly optimize email for mobile, you need to refine your campaigns. Your first mobile email campaign is going to have a lot of room for improvement. The only way to make effective adjustments is to test different elements and compare the results.