Mobilizing your Emails via a Mobile Mentality
(Updated July 2018) As email marketers, we know you strategize your content across a variety of platforms, and you mobilize your resources to do the most with what you have. But today, though we’re talking about mobilizing, we don’t mean “to assemble or organize, to prepare, as for readiness,” which is our current dictionary’s definition of the term. Trust us, in five years, there will be another entry in Miriam-Webster’s, or at least the email marketing bible. And it will read something like the following:
Mobilize: To create a streamlined or otherwise mobile-friendly version of your email, website, or other internet content, so that your smartphone-users can see your content the way it’s meant to be viewed.
If you haven’t thought about making your content mobile yet, now is the time. If your emails don’t render effectively on a smartphone, you run the risk of not only having a bad user experience and ignored email, but damaging your brand as well.
If a specific template for mobile versions isn’t enabled in your ESP, create a mobile-friendly HTML template to ensure it’s still viewable on a desktop computer, a tablet device (e.g., an iPad or Android tablet) or smartphone.
In addition to general appearance, you also should think about what you’re asking from your customers in your email marketing messages. Many emails promote or require a clickthrough to a landing page. This leads to yet another call for mobilization–in this case, landing pages optimized for mobile devices. But to take a step back, because maybe it means rethinking your email call to action. Should it change to be effective for a mobile audience? Maybe an effective mobilized email campaign shouldn’t involve complicated clickthroughs or multiple links.
Another way to start thinking about mobile integration with your email campaign is to use SMS to gain subscribers. People are texting more than ever: it’s quick, simple, short, and on-the-go in a way that email and even social sharing isn’t. Allowing subscribers to opt-in to receive text updates from you and to subscribe to email updates using SMS is yet another way to make your email marketing campaign visible and available to prospects. Just be sure to set expectations on the maximum number of texts they’ll receive from you per week or month, since many people still don’t have unlimited text plans, and too many texts will quickly become unwelcome. With that in mind, use your text message marketing strategy judiciously.
Giving your customers more, as well as easy ways to sign up, will allow for more email opt-ins.
About the Author: Sharon
