The rise and rise of mobile email

In the previous article we discussed the importance of image placement and usage in your email design and how it affects the rendering of your email. While the focus of this article was mainly on standard desktop and web-based email clients, the growing number of users reading email on their mobile phones presents an even greater challenge to the already challenging world of email design.

You already know the importance of testing how your email renders across multiple email clients, with the typical examples being Outlook 2003 & 2007, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Lotus Notes and Gmail. Add to that the importance of testing on both PC and Mac platforms. Now you can add mobile platforms to the mix. Exhausted yet?

Mobile presents a new set of design challenges, not least of which is the amount of screen real estate available to view the email. You have limited amount of space to get your key message(s) across, therefore you want to ensure your text content is right at the top and images are kept small and to a minimum.

HTML is another issue with mobiles, as not all will display it properly or at all. You should therefore, always send your emails out in multipart format to ensure the best format is displayed on the mobile device. It is important that you create a text version of your email so that if the phone cannot display HTML, the recipient will get the text version. For example, Blackberry’s will display the text version over the HTML when the email is sent in multipart. However, if no text version was created the HTML will be displayed in a broken format with links replacing images.

Fortunately there are tools out there to assist you in this testing process. Campaign Master’s Optimiser module allows you to view how your email will appear in a variety of email clients and mobile devises in one go taking the pain out of testing.

Want to know more about mobile and Optimiser? Contact us today.