Православни иконииконимебели от чам
Mobiles are not on the radar for many organizations – and they really should be. But not in the way you might expect.
Mobile apps and mobile web are getting a lot attention, but they are still only tiny slices of the big Internet pie. I’m thinking about mobile email — an audience that is already connected to your communications streams, and is very likely being ignored.
Take the example from a large Canadian advocacy organization with a well-developed online presence. Web visitors using mobile devices grew from 0.5% in 2009 to 2.0% in 2010 . That’s pretty strong growth – 400% fromyear to year — but still such small numbers that the Mobile Web sits safely in the “we’ll do something next year” file.
It’s an entirely different picture if you look at email, where email broadcasts over the past three months averaged between 6-8% open rate on mobile devices (vs. desktop and browser-based email readers). That translates to thousands of connected constituents who are using a mobile devices to stay informed on this organization’s activities. That’s an audience that deserves a bit of attention, and raises a few immediate questions.
What do mobile email users see when they open your email newsletter?
The mobile market is very fragmented with many different devices and email programs, so it’s pretty difficult to generalize about the experience of mobile email, except to say that it ranges from poor to terrible when viewing messages that have not been optimized for small screens. Newsletters designed for larger computer screens require awkward side-to-side scrolling and/or zooming when viewed on a small mobile screen. (Tablet computers like the iPad are a bit of an exception – lots of viewing space, but still not the best experience because thumbs are a lot stubbier than mouse pointers when trying to hit links).
What do mobile email users want to see when they open your email newsletter?
That question is certainly not being asked often enough for all newsletter channels, let alone mobile readers. Email is the most popular activity on mobiles (42%, versus 10% for social media), and 90% of mobile email users share the same account between their mobile device and their desktop/laptop. IBM researchers characterize mobile email behaviour as largely ‘triage’ – deciding what needs to be dealt with immediately and what can be left for later. This also includes scanning for items of immediate interest (to fill a few minutes while waiting for the bus, for instance). This is where organizations can focus some attention — what is going to get the attention and interest of a mobile email reader? A few good ideas: alerts, cyberactions, quizzes, slideshows, videos, top-10 lists, book reviews. (If these sounds a bit familiar, they are also on the list of best practices for email newsletters in general.)
Designing newsletters for mobile email readers
Chris Studabaker from the online marketing firm Exact Target has shared a few valuable pointers on designing email newsletters for mobile readers while still maintaining a high quality experience on desktops and laptops.
Here are a few highlights:
- Be concise and condense your content into short, direct pieces
- Present visible, clickable calls to action that connect to mobile-optimized webpages
- Format your newsletter in a single column if possible. Some mobile readers will reformat column text to fit a more narrow viewable screen.
- If your newsletter has multiple columns, keep your column widths to 320 pixels or less. That width will fit comfortably on many mobile devices
- Maximize the impact of your subject line. Only the first 35 characters are usually visible on a mobile reader.
- Preheaders are valuable (for open rate) and costly (takes up space on initial screen. Keep preheaders to 90 characters or less. Try using an invisible image with <Alt> text to hide your preheader when the message is opened.
- ‘Above the fold’ for mobile readers should be considered no larger than 320 x 230 px (iPhone
- Clickable buttons should be large enough to be easily pressed with finger (size, spacing)
View Chris’s full webinar presentation “Email Design in the Age of the Mobile Inbox“.
