Mobile email is becoming to be more and more important. Opens on Mobiles increased by 34% last year in just five months, according to Return Path. The stats on mobile email have seen growth and growth and growth. So it’s time have a closer look at it and see what features you need and how to make your design mobile freindly.

4 must have features from your Email newsletter provider

Here are 4 features that your Email newsletter software provider should minimally have when you are serious about mobile email.

Opens by Device: it is possible to know which device an email is opened on when the images are loaded, your ESP should be able to report this back to you.

Inbox Previews: Rather than having to send test emails to an email address in every single inbox, you should have access to a tool that gives you screen shots of your email in all the inboxes you need and preferably in order of usage within your list, all in a couple of clicks.

Heat Map: It really helps when you can get a view of how the email was clicked by your recipients. A heat map is handy because it gives you the email and over-lays the click counts for each link so you can see what got the most attention to allow you to re-organise content for when you need to cut down and prioritise for mobile.

Consultancy: in this ever changing medium you need to know that you can reply on your partners to fill in the gaps as well as provide you with software. You want a community site full of useful blogs and guides but you also want to be able to give your account manager a call for a chat or even a face to face to help keep your head straight.

Here are some more questions about mobile email you should ask your ESP now.

Mobile email experience

Marketers may spend most of their time optimising for the desktop & webmail inboxes however often this can make for a less than preferred experience for a mobile recipient.

While responsive design is the optimal route it can be complex and often needs an Email-HTML expert, it is however possible to tweak a desktop email to help the mobile experience…

Desktop email vs Mobile email

First let’s discuss the difference between the two:

• Desktop emails are 600px wide
• Desktop images are normally blocked when they are opened
• Mobiles need 300px
• All iPhone emails default to load images automatically.
• No-one likes to have to scroll left and right as well as up and down
• Mobiles it will zoom out in order to fit the whole message in
• Pinch-zoom / double tap to zoom in is available on mobiles

Mobile content key points

Due to the fact that someone may read email on a device mobile content needs to be:

• Less cluttered
• More to the point
• Prioritised as to what you want them to do
• Long and narrow, users will scroll down but not side to side

Here are 4 layout tips to try and test:

Adopt a two column structure
a)    Have a larger column on the left and a smaller on the right.
b)    In the larger left column have two columns, one of an image one for text;
This should the main text about 300px wide, making it easy to double tap and zoom into the copy and only have to scroll down to read.

Avoid having a full width banner in the header.
a)    A full width banner will make it hard to double-tap-zoom in the header
b)    Chop it in half, so it is 2 images of 300px each.

Avoid having text that covers the full with.
This includes the preheader. Try two lines at the top where you would have had one.

Prepare to lose right hand side of the content.
a) Recipients won’t get to the right column without being lead.
b) Make sure there is nothing in there people need: prioritise content
c) Or stick to one column and make everything bigger

Mobile email is one of the most impactful changes of late. Be sure you get into it and optimize your email for a mobile experience.