Email Marketing Best Practices: Make Mobile Leave Them Wanting More?
Is mobile email the equivalent of the executive summary of a whitepaper?
Mobile is a growing market. And you have to be addressing it! But don’t throw the email baby out with the bathwater. You have to redesign for mobile but keep in mind that just because someone sees your email on their smartphone first doesn’t mean they won’t see it on their laptop later.
Also remember that your mobile email still has to convince someone to take action. If you’re not driving conversions, you’re forgetting the whole reason for email marketing best practices.
Sometimes we’re getting so caught up in making our emails work for mobile, we’re forgetting to make our emails work for our bottom line.
As an email marketing vendor, we ran into this a few months ago when a client redesigned their email template to be optimized for mobile…but it had a negative impact on the template’s appearance in a regular email client. And since the mobile audience was considerably smaller, they had shortchanged the majority for the sake of the minority.
Maybe we should try to think of mobile as the executive summary you might include with a whitepaper. When you provide such a summary, you give the potential reader a chance at a preview so they can decide whether or not they want to read the whole thing. Written well, an executive summary will entice the reader to move past the first page and delve on into your content. A summary can’t be the whitepaper!
Same with mobile. You can’t really deliver the whole, rich email experience you want to deliver to a smartphone. Instead, think of your mobile email as the executive summary. Work it to make the recipient want more. Then have it linked to a killer landing page (the equivalent of your whitepaper).
We do have to make our email design and email copywriting work for mobile, but we can’t forget mobile emails have a job beyond fitting on the screen of a PDA: They still have to drive someone to take some kind of action.
It’s email marketing best practices…on a much smaller screen.
About the Author: LaRock
