8 Steps for Creating Mobile Friendly Emails

The number of people reading emails on their mobile devices is growing at an incredible rate.  Year over year data shows email opens on mobile devices grew 83.4% (WhatCounts).  If you’re not optimizing your emails for mobile readership, you’re likely missing out on additional opens, clicks, and even conversions/revenue.  Here are eight easy steps to follow to ensure your emails are mobile friendly:

1. Enlarge Fonts – Strive for a body copy minimum of 14 px and headline of 22 px. To avoid your text being resized, define “-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%” in the CSS.
2. Know Your Scale- iOS devices will zoom to fit your email to the width of the screen, but most other mobile operating systems will not.  To avoid making people have to scroll horizontally, consider trimming your emails to between 320-550 px wide.
3. Call to Action- Make the call to actions more prominent.  They should be obvious and “tappable” with a minimum size of 44x44px.
4. Images – Use more text than images if possible.  Every mobile operating system except iOS blocks images by default, so the more text, the better. Also, make sure to always provide alt text for images.  
5. Smart Coding- Make sure you keep mobile devices in mind when coding your emails. A few things to remember – use only tables for layout, not divs. Use inline CSS on all block-level elements rather than embedded. Never use CSS shorthand.  Define background color inside a container table instead of the body. Make sure images have defined dimensions and relevant alt text.
6. Streamline – Less can be more. The email’s purpose is to entice a click.  Don’t try and put all your information within the email itself, rather just include what’s necessary to encourage a click through.
7. Mobile Friendly Landing Pages- Just as it’s important to have a mobile friendly email, it’s just as important to have a mobile friendly landing page.  If you have a mobile version of your website make sure traffic from smartphones is diverted to that platform.
8. Test, Test, Test – Make sure you test on smartphones before you send anything to your customers.

By taking some or all of the steps above, you will not only create a better customer experience, you can also boost your email marketing results.  Remember: having people on your email list is vital to your business. You work hard to get them on your list and open your emails. When 20-40% of your list may be using a mobile device to open your emails, be sure that they can read those emails and take action.