Email Marketing in the Mobile world - 10 Tips for Responsive Design Email Newsletters

Over half of all email is now opened on a mobile device and most people read work and personal emails together, getting all emails all at once via a their mobile.

More mobile devices are registered every day than there are weddings, babies born, and deaths COMBINED each day globally… x2!

How does the shift towards mobile change your marketing strategies?

According to Google’s Our Mobile Planet, email is the number-one smartphone activity—over 75% of smartphone users access their email via their phone.

Marketers are already experimenting with responsive designs for email marketing, optimising design for the small screens of mobile devices. Expect a big shift in email marketing, where optimisation for mobile phones will be prioritised over the PC.

A recent survey by eNewsletter software Mail Chimp surveyed participants on their email behaviour. 72% of the people read their emails in bed. Most people use their phones as an alarm clock, so the common morning action is to turn off the alarm and hit the email icon. Often readers haven’t even turned on the lights yet and are in bed reading your emails.

77% of participants reported that they check their email “everywhere” or “obsessively.”  These readers have notifications set to alert them when an email arrives. They tend to check their mobile device immediately upon feeling that buzz or hearing the alert tone.

About 40 percent of emails now get opened on mobile devices. The "one size fits all" approach to email design is no longer good enough.

  Responsive emails can highlight essential information in the mobile version of a message and hide elements that mobile readers don't need in order to understand your message or act on it. 

In today's society of instant gratification, people have short attention spans. They want the news in 140-character snippets, it’s easy for viewers to lose interest with an email newsletter that doesn’t get straight to the point or entice the viewers to click through to a landing page with an interesting subject line and introduction content.

The quickest way to turn people off your email newsletter is to be shameless self promoters – using your email newsletter only to talk about the great things you’ve done this month.

As a rule, make just one in six articles about you – but not just as a promotion, make sure it still adds value to your reader. For example, you may have launched free overnight shipping or a new local office – this is of great benefit to your customers – tell them. It was Josie’s birthday in accounts – really does your customer care?

If you’re not sure where to start with creating engaging content, below is a simple format that can be followed for any company, regardless of the business you are in

For more ideas and tips on creating interesting content, view our Content Marketing Articles