On the sliding scale of mobile-friendliness, most brands are just starting to get a grip on the fundamentals of
email content design. In fact, ExactTarget research performed in early October found that out of nearly 160 B2C brands — including retailers, restaurants, manufacturers, travel and hospitality companies, and nonprofits — only 12 percent use responsive email design and 10 percent use mobile-aware design, while the remaining 78 percent still use largely desktop-centric email designs.
Here’s a breakdown of the three major gradations of mobile email design and where the industry is with each of them:
Responsive design
Responsive design has become a general term for a basket of advanced techniques that serve up versions or renderings of an email that are optimized for particular screen resolutions or email clients. Whether it’s fluid, liquid, scalable, adaptive, or truly responsive design or powered by live content, all of these techniques involve extra email design and coding — and often the creation of two or more versions of an email. But the result is email messaging that looks good and functions properly on a range of devices and interfaces.
Of all the potential “flavors” of responsive design, adaptive is probably the most notable. This design approach generally uses one or two pixel-width “breakpoints” that correspond to typical screen sizes for smartphones, tablets, and desktops, triggering automatic reformatting and adjustments so that the content experience is optimized for viewing on the selected screen sizes.
For instance, St. Jude Children’s Hospital uses a very straightforward execution of this approach. Many marketers will likely not see the need to improve their email designs beyond this point for a long time.
Despite a torrent of talk about responsive design, adoption is relatively low in most industries. However, that will change over the next 12 months for two reasons:
Firstly, with nearly half of all email content being read on mobile devices, we’re set to have our first mobile holiday season ever — and retailers aren’t prepared. With 63 percent of consumers saying they delete emails immediately if they are not optimized for mobile (according to e-Dialog), there are going to be some underperforming email programs this season. And, as a result, come January, the industry will likely see a renewed interest in responsive design.
Secondly, while responsive email content design used to involve quite a bit of custom coding, email service providers are increasingly offering responsive email templates, making it much easier for brands to take advantage of this technology. More than anything else, the productizing of responsive design is what will take it from being a niche tactic this year to a mainstream tactic next year.
Some brands are already moving beyond mobile-friendly design to “mobile-targeted” design. Being mobile-targeted means your email content not only looks different on mobile devices than it does on desktops, the content itself is different. AT&T is one brand that’s been ahead of the curve, using responsive design to not only reconfigure content into a nice, single-column view, but to also turn a phone number in the desktop version into a “tap to call” button in the mobile version.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible. For instance, you could send an email that is designed to show desktop readers an online-only discount and a catalog request call-to-action, while smartphone readers would see a store-online discount and a mobile app call-to-action. Marry up mobile-targeted design with data on past interactions, time of day information, and geo-location and messaging for email content could get very sophisticated.
Mobile-aware design
Responsive design is not the only way to create mobile-friendly email content. You can still be ahead of the curve and reap most of the benefits of being mobile-friendly if you adopt mobile-aware design techniques, which include:
Using a single-column layout
Employing large images, text, and buttons
Spacing out links so there are fewer mis-taps
These design techniques involve creating a single email that functions well across a range of screen sizes, but is deferential to smartphones.
This summer, a number of big retailers made the jump to mobile-aware email templates, including Banana Republic, JCPenney, Staples, and Victoria’s Secret. That such large retailers would embrace this approach over responsive design — even if it’s only in the short-term — is a strong validation of its benefits.
As part of Victoria’s Secret’s most recent email content redesign, the company reduced the number of links in its navigation bar to 4 from 11, drastically reduced the average number of images and words used in its message blocks, and reduced and stacked the links in its administration tool bar. The result is a much shorter, more visual email message that improves the user experience on mobile devices.
Desktop-centric design
Alarmingly, the vast majority of B2C brands is still employing a largely desktop-centric email content design — one that’s optimized for viewing on large desktop and laptop monitors and has small links and buttons that are well suited to mouse clicks, but not fingertips.
However, there are some positive signs here. Some brands are using what I call “quasi–mobile-aware” design, which is to say that the primary and secondary messages of their emails use images and buttons that are mobile-friendly, but the header, navigation bar, footer and other elements are still desktop-centric. This is the first step that many marketers take toward being mobile-friendly. Rather than overhaul their entire template, they’re improving the content that changes from email to email.
One-third of the nearly 160 B2C brands examined in the ExactTarget study used a quasi–mobile-aware email design.
It’s worth noting that as tablets and other touch screens replace laptops, mobile-aware design will likely replace desktop-centric designs entirely at some point.
Landing pages: The last mile
No matter how mobile-friendly your email content becomes, if your website landing pages are not mobile-friendly as well, then your efforts may be all for naught. Just like mobile users find mobile-unfriendly emails frustrating and are very likely to just delete them, they are also very likely to abandon websites that are not optimized for mobile. Even worse, they’re quite likely never to visit your site again. So when optimizing your email content using any of the above techniques, you may also want to make similar changes on your landing pages to make sure you are providing a consistent content experience for your audience.
The holiday season and beyond
Retailers are highly risk-adverse during the holiday season, but this year, the evolving mobile landscape will force some of them to experiment anyway. For some, the risk of doing nothing will far outweigh the risk of doing something that may need to be fine-tuned later on.
The holiday season has a number of critical shopping days where mobile will play a key role. In addition to all the weekends in December, some of the season’s high-mobility days include:
The day before Thanksgiving, which is the busiest travel day of the year
Thanksgiving Day, when consumers are engaging in post-feast and post-game shopping and retailers are responding by increasingly releasing their Black Friday deals early
Black Friday and “Cyber Monday,” when many consumers are getting a jump on their holiday shopping
Christmas Day, when stores are closed but websites are still open to receive a share of the estimated $30 billion in gift cards that shoppers will receive
The number of brands that deploy responsive or mobile-aware emails on these days will give us a good indication of just how serious marketers are about catching up to consumer expectations, which are currently leaving many brands in the dust. The opportunity to get prepared starts right now!
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Cover image via Bigstock
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