Mobile is quickly becoming the go-to place for consumers to check email, therefore it’s critical that marketers optimise their email creative for mobile devices, or risk alienating a significant share of their audience.

More reading emails on mobile

Recent statistics indicate over a third of consumers now read emails on their mobile devices. Among 18-34 year olds this number rises to over 50%.

With more people checking their emails on a mobile device, the important question to ask is whether they are actually “reading” them. In regards to marketing messages, there are some compelling statistics to suggest that the answer is no.

Click throughs in decline

Email marketing messages have seen a decline in open and click-through rates over the past few years. But with email now being more accessible than ever, why would opens and clicks be decreasing?

The reason is not so much that people are not interacting with emails on mobile devices, but because they can’t. Many organisations haven’t begun to optimise their emails to be read on a mobile device, making it extremely difficult for customers to engage.

Optimise the user experience

Given the restricted viewing space on mobile devices, an email is typically scaled down in size. Images and text are shrunk to fit the mobile device’s screen, requiring the recipient to apply zoom gestures and read small sections at a time.

Panning up and down, left and right proves frustrating to read and even more so to interact with. Eventually, the recipient simply gives up. Mobile devices make reading emails more accessible, but most marketers are still designing their campaigns for the desktop.

These are my top tips to creating a mobile friendly email campaign:

• Above the fold content – test all of your campaign on a smartphone to ensure the key message is delivered upon opening, without the need for scrolling.
• Quick load times – use images sparingly.
• Large fonts – ensure fonts render large enough to read without any zooming.
• Large, clear call-to-action – links should be clear and buttons should be large enough to click with the tap of a finger (a minimum of 45 pixels wide).
• Create a mobile optimised landing page – this ensures your newly engaged mobile audience will continue to enjoy the benefits of reading your easy-to-read content once they have “clicked through”.

One final tip; to further enhance your emails, advanced CSS can be applied to emails so that content renders specifically (and not simply resized) for mobile devices, enabling additional functionality not available on desktop versions.

The Orchard Agency is a full service email marketing agency based in Melbourne.