People are on the go, and your emails should be built for the go too!

In 2016, the importance of building mobile responsive emails continues to steadily grow. Industry experts vary in opinion on what percentages of contacts open emails on their mobile devices. Some experts will say the overall number is around 40%, while others say it is as high as 60%. 

According to respected email testing and analytic company Litmus and their 2016 State of Email report, “Over the course of 2015, mobile opens increased 17% to now represent 55% of opens.”

Mobile responsiveness makes the emails we send easier for recipients to read. When optimized for mobile delivery, emails should contain images no larger than 320 pixels. Your copy should have a pre-header, and the body text should adjust automatically and not require any “zooming” to easily read the text.  

You may be asking, what is a pre-header? A pre-headers is the text that is present under a subject line before you actually open an email in your email reader. Pre-headers display in both mobile and desktop formats, and high-quality pre-headers can be a good tool to achieving higher open rates –it is a second chance to capture the reader’s attention.

According to Campaign Monitor, these are some of the current parameters for mobile pre-headers:
 

We suggest that you keep pre-headers between 40 to 50 characters. The pre-header should always be meaningful, and build upon the subject line. Below is an example of a pre-header and what it looks like from the mobile user’s view. The blue arrow signifies the subject line while the red line signifies the pre-header. As you can see, the pre-header displays right under the subject line.

When crafting a mobile responsive email, you want to make sure that it can scale down to a 320 pixel wide message. Some agencies create tabled emails, where the maximum width is 600 pixels and their text and images scale down to a 320 pixel message. When using this format, the text should not change and if the images are formatted correctly, they will scale down to the mobile responsive format you are looking for.

The attributes you should use are the following: max-width=”600px;” width=”100%;” Height=”auto”

According to Apple and Google, nothing smaller than 16 pixels should be used for text, and 18 to 22 pixels is ideal. For clickable buttons, the recommend at least 46 pixels squared. 

So we have outlined how to make an email mobile responsive, and mentioned that that anywhere from 40%-60% of your lists contacts will be opening their emails on mobile devices.  But what if you decided not to make your email’s mobile responsive? 

Well, you are putting your lists at risk. As Litmus points out, “80% of people delete an email if it doesn’t look good on their mobile device.”

That has the potential to be a significant number of contacts on your list. Imagine you had a list of 200,000, 50% of those contacts opened via mobile device, and your emails were not mobile responsive. If the stats provided by Litmus hold true, 80,000 contacts are simply deleting your emails. Some may not be deleting it every time. But do you want to take that chance?

If a contact deletes your email, they have zero chance of purchasing your product or donating to your cause — wasting time and money.  Results will suffer, which could result in  significant dissatisfaction from your client.

Mustard Seed Interactive is an expert email provider that works diligently to make sure that your emails reach our contacts inbox.  We’re here to help you optimize your emails for the best inbox placement and engagement of your emails, which will greatly increase the likelihood that your audience will act upon your message.

Daniel R. Glass is the Email Manager of Mustard Seed Interactive. He can be reached at Daniel@mustardseedinteractive.com