Have a cell phone? I bet you do. As do your spouse, your kids and your parents. Usage of cell phones and smart phones is at an all-time high and will only continue to climb. That means you must be monitoring the usage of your teenage daughter who has a tendency to go over her texting limit each month. And it means you’re now responsible for ensuring your company’s email marketing best practices include designing for these mobile devices, as more people use smart phones to read email.
Some email service providers (ESPs) are creating tools for mobile optimization so it could be you will be able to simply leverage what they’re offering rather than creating new templates in-house. Still, it’s smart to be educated about email design best practices for mobile.
A comprehensive StrongMail article titled “The Rapidly Shifting Mobile Landscape” gives plenty of specific advice on designing for mobile. Definitely take a look at it if this is something you’re tackling-or might have to tackle in the future.
You can also turn to ClickMail for help with email design for smart phones. It’s one of the add-on services unique to us as email marketing vendors.
Most important, however, is the testing of how these emails render, both on computers and smart phones. If you design for mobile alone and sacrifice effective rendering on a computer as a result-while most of your audience is still reading your email on a computer-you’re working against your email marketing ROI. Email marketing best practices should include designing for the majority, and allowing for the minority. That means email design that works on a smart phone without email design that looks nonsensical on a computer or laptop screen.
At ClickMail, we’re big proponents of testing. Based on years of experience serving email marketing clients just like you, we encourage you to consider using PivotalVeracity for testing the rendering of your email designs as part of your email marketing best practices. You can use the PivotalVeracity service as a ClickMail client, and at the same time, get our expertise in email marketing best practices…for effective email marketing on any kind of device, PC or Mac.
Whether it’s a Droid or a Dell, a Motorola or a Mac, an iPhone or an IBM, make sure your email design is right–and right on–every time by testing.
