The majority of your ideal customers are searching for deals, opening e-mails, responding to calls to action, and making purchases on their mobile devices. How can you design your e-mail marketing newsletters to capitalize on this mobile reality?
1. Be mobile-friendly
Here at Tate Design, we’ve been optimizing websites for search engines and mobile devices for a number of years. We have also been guiding you toward mobile-friendly design. Our posts on the topic include
• A Priority of 2013: Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly
• What Your Business Needs To Know About Mobile
• Mobile 101: Important Facts And Figures
Search engines, including Google, now look at mobile friendliness as part of their search engine ranking process. Be mobile-friendly.
2. Optimize for mobile devices
It’s not enough to be mobile-friendly these days. With the amount of content you and your business create, you need that material to show up perfectly every time without you having to make fixes or adjustments AND you should make this as easy as possible on yourself.
Tate Design can facilitate this process by creating templates that are both mobile-friendly and responsive. This means that your images and text will display beautifully regardless of the device—desktop PC, smartphone, tablet—or the size of the screen.
With responsive templates, you easily replicate your branding while capturing mobile-friendly auto-sizing and configurations. You get great results, time after time.
3. Use fewer characters
You don’t have a lot of real estate on a smartphone screen so learn to be concise. To display to best advantage on all devices at the present time, limit the following
Your name: 23 characters
Your subject line: 30 characters
Your attention-grabber (sometimes called a pre-header or meta description): 40 characters
Keep your message short and direct. Point viewers to your website for more details. Tate Design offers copywriting services that deliver clear, persuasive copy.
4. Offer value
Use your subject line, pre-header, body of your message, and clickable buttons or text links to bring the reader to a decision point. Make the value of what you are offering so obvious they will choose to take the desired action immediately. Part of the appeal of mobile devices is instantaneous results, so put that to work for you.
5. Make it easy to respond
Require fewer clicks and less scrolling. Direct people to your website for in-depth information.
Design big call-to-action buttons and use them instead of text links. This makes clicking in the right place so much easier for everyone, including those who are using their fingers on their smartphones. Let Tate Design create graphic images that will display well for you and showcase your brand.
6. Take a second look at your images
Try to view your images on multiple devices to see if they
• Resize properly or become distorted or cropped inappropriately
• Contain easy-to-read text or are impossible to decipher
• Are clear or too busy when reduced to a smaller size
Consider adding appropriate captions and ALT tags instead of cluttering up images with text. For infographics with a lot of written information, add a link to a PDF version of the original on your website.
Meet the challenges of e-mail marketing in an increasingly mobile-dependent world head-on. Contact Tate Design at 610.725.0702 or e-mail [email protected] for help in making your next e-mail marketing campaign mobile-friendly, responsive, and effective.
