Mobile Email: A Balancing Act

Author:

Andrew Gottlieb

I tried to resist for as long as possible; making excuses, avoiding the mall, and pretending I was above the hype.  Eventually though it was inevitable and I succumbed to the pressure to buy the ever ubiquitous “Smartphone”.  My tech poison was the Blackberry Tour, a formally working-mans phone revamped as a tweeting, surfing, multi-tasker for those young and old alike. Like many of my friends I eventually found myself tethered to the device connecting it with Twitter, Facebook, email, and every other conceivable aspect of my life. As an email marketer though one piece of this new found puzzle did stick out in my mind as being very archaic.  Why did my emails look so bad?  It ultimately lead me on a month-long journey speaking to coders, industry experts, and others in the business to find out why and how I can help my clients make their emails look great, perform better and ultimately push the user to buy their product.
 
What’s With My Email?
Smartphone’s like computers use different operating systems (OS’) from brand to brand.  There’s Android, Microsoft Windows Mobile, RIM BlackBerry OS, Symbian OS (Europe), and several others out there with various versions.  This ultimately causes an issue for creative teams as they can’t keep certain elements and syntax consistent across all platforms.  It’s kind of like trying to make an engine that will work in all cars.  At the end of the day though it is important to remember this and realize that there is nothing that you can do to make your email look perfect across all platforms but there are ways to make it work in as many as possible with as few issues.
It is also important to remember that as a marketer your audience is still going to be reading your email communications on their PC’s, thus you don’t want to dumb down your email so much that it under optimizes the email on a PC.  Again it is a balancing act to ensure that one viewing channel isn’t over or under utilized than another.
 
Mobile Link
The first thing I always tell my clients who want to jump on the mobile bandwagon is to consider the implementation of a “Mobile Link” in their communications.  This simple but effective method is a link placed above the fold that directs users to a completely text version of the email.  This can easily be implemented by hosting a plain text version of the email for those users who do not have an HTML enabled device.
This link also provides a great method for marketers to track in a general sense who is viewing on their mobile device.  The logic is that if a user clicks on the mobile link they want to see a simple version on a mobile device.  Thus if a substantial percentage of your users are clicking on this link you might want to consider leaning more to a mobile versus PC friendly creative.
 



Leave out the Images
One of the biggest mistakes that I see as a marketer is when clients try to make their emails full of large bulky images.  The problem with this thought process is that large images on both PC and mobile version will be initially stripped out.  If you don’t catch the users attention within the first 2-3 inches of real estate you have already lost them.  So if your email is full of images that don’t render and they are taking up a large portion of the email the user will move on to something else.  If you do feel it necessary to include images though make sure to use descriptive ALT text as this will show in some email environments when images are blocked.
 
Your Best Friend: Pre-header Text
PC and mobile email users alike have a tendency to scan emails by name of sender and subject line.  Because these pieces of information are virtually your only pitch to get a user to open your communication you want to make sure you follow sender and subject line best practices.  By following these best practices that you should already be utilizing you will see higher open, click and hopefully conversion rates.
 

 
Wrapping it up
A lot of marketers think that the mobile environment is one that requires extensive development or dedicated resources, but this is actually far from the truth.  By implementing some of the simple items that I outlined above you should be able to please your customers and hopefully wow your clients.