Top 10 Mobile Email Marketing Formatting Tips
Mobile Web-enabled devices are proliferating faster than bunnies at Easter, so your small business’ email marketing efforts must take into consideration that your newsletters will be read on a dizzying array of tiny screens. Applying these top 10 mobile email marketing formatting tips, along with picking one of the best available email marketing services, will help ensure that your newsletters will be readable and effective.
1. Place content high and left
When interpreting a larger page, most mobile devices will start at the top left hand side and allow the user to scroll around to discover the rest. If you do not have specific email templates set up for mobile resolutions, placing all of your most relevant content high and left will help your audience to properly read your email.
2. Static is the best presentation
With the hodgepodge of contrasting and conflicting mobile device standards, you’re best off to just avoid the whole morass and ban from your mobile email marketing newsletter campaign Flash, Ajax, HTML5, Java, and any other technology which provides fancy effects at the cost of being unreadable by many of your on-the-go customers.
3. Go back to basic HTML.
Tables are a set of HTML structures which do not readily translate well on mobile devices, and CSS generally gets overridden by browser-based email services like Yahoo Mail and Gmail. To ensure cross-client compatibility keep the HTML simple, straightforward, and down to basics like <FONT> tags. When creating an email for mobile compatibility take a page from the Prince songbook: Tonight You’re Going To Code Like It’s 1999.
4. Validate your code.
Although WML is the coding language traditionally specified for mobile users, XHTML and just plain old HTML is more common. If your coding is invalid, you’re running the risk of widespread incompatibilities which will render your email unreadable on a variety of devices. W3C and other validators can analyze your code and point out problems before you send the email.
5. Encode it correctly.
We’ve all seen emails where the apostrophes turn into diamonds and the quotation marks become a jumble of characters. In order to avoid that problem of character encoding always opt for UTF-8, and your email text will be readable across the board.
6. Keep the file size small.
A good rule of thumb with mobile emails is to keep their file sizes under 20 kilobytes so that they can be downloaded and read quickly. This restrictive limit obviates any extensive graphics or loads of content, and in the mobile email ecosystem, that’s a desirable trait!
7. Provide a plain text alternative.
Multipart/Alternative MIME is the mobile email marketer’s best friend as many users have their mobile devices set to display plain text only, so if you’re not providing them their preferred alternative, your HTML email template will display as unreadable if it displays at all.
8. Keep widths fluid.
Your email template should allow for the width of your displayed message to resize according to screen resolution. AOL 9’s preview pane is less than 200 pixels wide, and many mobile devices barely hit 300 pixels. Just because the email looks great on your desktop’s 1920 x 1200 27 monitor does not mean that it will be readable on a tiny smartphone screen.
9. View your email in simulators.
There are a number of widely available mobile browser simulators available where you can read your email as it would be seen by the user of any specific device. Sending out any email marketing campaign newsletters without taking care to ensure that they display properly will alienate the owners of the mobile devices who will receive an undecipherable mess.
10. K.I.S.S.
Keep It Simple, Seller (or something along those lines)! You don’t have to hire Cameron’s Avatar SFX team to create an email newsletter with impact. Your emails should focus on your message and not on your mad programming skills. In mobile email marketing the medium is not the message, the message is the message!
Avoiding common formatting pratfalls will ensure that your campaign emails get read, not deleted!
