Email marketing to mobile devices

Posted in Email Marketing, General by redembermarketing on March 5th, 2009

One of the more common follow up questions after last week’s MeetUp presentation was how to optimize emails for delivery to mobile devices.  (Victor even posted it on their discussion board)  There are several issues to consider if you think that a large number of your subscribers/contacts are reading their emails on a mobile device.  [And let's face it, they are!]

First, do you know how many or which contacts actually ARE reading your content on a mobile device? That makes a great piece of data to collect from your subscribers since it serves as a good segmentation field. Send mobile-device optimized content to that group, HTML emails to the rest, or perhaps there’s another subgroup that just prefers the plain text email. It’s a simple radio button or check-box option on your sign up form, but could have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns. Imagine that – asking your customers how they want to receive communications… and then actually listening to them!

Of course, the trade off is that once you move away from HTML emails, you start to lose some analytics resolution your open rates are tied to a tiny image being rendered in the email client. Hence, the discussion that is in progress over at the Email Experience Council who is trying to standardize metric terminology by shifting from “Open Rates” to “Render Rates.” PDF: The Render Rate Call for Action (by the way, can someone tell them to remove the spaces from their document file names?)  You might even choose to forgo your tracking links, since they tend to be long, clogging up valuable space on the mobile device’s small screen with meaningless characters when you really want them to be reading your content or visiting your site.

Hmm, is email marketing starting to sound more complicated than it should? Well, yes and no.

I believe that in many ways, effective email design can be more challenging than general website design nowadays.  With well established standards being adhered to across the 3 or 4 major browsers (browser statistics and browser market share), website development has come a long way over the past 10 years.  Email clients on the other hand, are much more numerous and their ability to render HTML, CSS and other design elements are all over the map (email client statistics).  And now we have mobile devices to deal with!  Email testing services like ReturnPath and LitmusApp are offering ever-better mobile device rendering, but themes, screen sizes, fonts, and preferences can vary widely.

For instance, on my BlackBerry Pearl, I can only see about 9 characters in the “From” name in the email list view, maybe 12 if there are a lot of skinny letters in the name.  But maybe that number increases to 14 or 15 on another device or with another setting.  Then there’s the subject line and the email body to consider.  Some general rules of thumb I’ve found indicate that most text messages display 60 to 80 characters per line (if your email service provider doesn’t already provide a guide to see where those limits are, try using a sticky note on your screen as an easy alternative).  Mobile platforms display somewhere beterrn 20 to 40 characters in 12 to 15 lines per screen (again, this varies based on the device, resolution, themes and selected text styles).   Keep these numbers in mind when you’re composing “chunks” of content to make them easier to read.

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MOBILE DEVICE EMAIL IDEAS
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Tastefully using patterns of characters to identify sections of your text version of your email is certainly one tactic to help users view your emails on mobile devices.  Didn’t that section header catch your attention? Use a typographic device such as repeating characters, but keep in mind that it would be wise to keep them significantly less than the character widths described above to avoid unnecessary breaks, which would pretty much undermine your whole reason for putting them there in the first place.

Why not take the extra step of creating a simple HTML (limit tag usage to paragraph, and font styles) and put a link to that “mobile version” of your email at the top of the message? Simple text like “Mobile Version: URL” would work well.  Most mobile devices’ browsers will display simply-coded content fairly well, and your message will look better than it would in the plain text displayed on the default email client on the device.

Put a short table of contents at the top of the email to provide an incentive for readers to scroll down to that important information you’re sending them.  This might be especially important if your email is on the long side, since long messages tend to get truncated, and readers may need an incentive to wait for the device to download more content.

What do you think?  Have you tried some new ways to help get your message out to mobile devices?