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The “mobile” challenge in email marketing05.03.2010Thanks to the trend triggered by the iPhone, more and more newsletters are being read on smartphones. For us marketers, this is reason enough to tackle this issue. In recent years, email programs have been becoming increasingly powerful. The drop-off in prices for Internet connections has caused issues like email size to recede into the background. Newsletters considerably over 100 KB in size, complex layouts and large images are all seen as standards today. Smartphones have drawn the line: Newsletters that are too large are barely readable, take too long to load or are truncated. Many smartphones cannot display newsletters at all in any reasonable manner or the Web addresses provided cannot be clicked. Is a version for smartphones the only way forward? What to do? One option that is often discussed is a link in the newsletter that leads to a “mobile version”. However, I do not recommend this as smartphone users first have to fork out a lot of money to receive the newsletter before they can click on this link. Some marketers are opting to offer the reader a version optimised for mobile phones in addition to the actual newsletter. This allows the unchanged original newsletter to be distributed to the majority of readers. In my opinion, however, this is not feasible. Not because it is technically impossible. Indeed, it would be very easy to explicitly offer the mobile version in the registration form. A professional email marketing solution like Inxmail Professional would then automatically generate this version and send it to the subscriber. However, who reads their emails on smartphones only? Many people read their emails both on PCs or notebooks and on smartphones. Some U.S. marketers refer to this kind of user behaviour as “triage”. Subscribers comb through their inbox on smartphones, for example, while waiting for a flight, travelling on a train or sitting in traffic. There, they read the important emails immediately; unimportant ones are deleted and the remainder is read later, when there is enough bandwidth to do so at home or at the office. In this context, the ‘pre-header’ helps recipients to decide whether it is worth investing the time and the download charges to read the email. In the CEO blog article entitled ‘Using the pre-header successfully’, you will learn how to use the pre-header to trigger such actions on the recipient's behalf. The solution: Optimise newsletters for mobile versions Although mobile readers are still a relatively new breed, more and more people are joining their ranks. For this reason, I recommend designing the newsletter in such a way that it can be displayed optimally on the mobile devices of major manufacturers. Find out which manufacturers I mean in the CEO blog article ‘How should email marketers prepare for smartphones?’. I also think it is important to be able to send multipart emails, in which a text version is also provided. The correct display should be checked using a display test or directly on the smartphone. We have developed the iPhone preview since the iPhone is one of the most important mobile display devices for newsletters. You can use the preview to test how your newsletter is displayed in the iPhone inbox. |
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