8 Ways to Improve Email Design for Mobile Devices
There’s no doubt that email design is an essential part of any email marketing strategy. Whether trying to reach a large target audience or simply elevate your email’s appearance, mobile email design can help you achieve your goals.
In this article, we’ll cover why mobile friendly emails are so important, what approaches you can use to create them, and review 8 great ways to improve your mobile emails.
What Is a Mobile First Email Design?
A mobile friendly email design is designed to be displayed well on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. This type of design takes into account the smaller screen size and touch-based input of these devices and typically features a simplified email layout and larger font sizes to make it easier to read on a smaller screen.
An email designer can make their design mobile friendly in several ways. First, they can build an entirely new email marketing campaign from the ground up, using responsive design techniques to ensure that the email will display well on all devices. Alternatively, they can modify an existing desktop-only template to perform well on mobile devices.
Why Is Mobile Optimization Important in Mobile Design?
As more and more people use their mobile devices to check their email, optimizing your emails for mobile screens is becoming increasingly important. Here are 5 reasons why it’s essential to optimize your email campaigns for mobile screens:
- With the ubiquity of mobile phones and other mobile devices, more and more people are using them to check their email on the go. This trend will only continue as smartphones become more powerful and feature-rich.
- Devices, aka the mobile device, have smaller screens, so your email needs to be easily read on a smaller screen. Therefore, you should use a clean layout with short but exciting subject lines for mobile display with clear headings and easy-to-read text. You should also use only a few images or complex HTML code, as this can make your email difficult to read on a small screen.
- Smartphones often have slower internet connections than desktop computers, so your mobile optimized email needs to load quickly so only screen readers can open and read it immediately. This is especially important if you are sending time-sensitive information or updates.
- People are more likely to mark your emails as spam when they see that the form address is not their own or that it looks like a mass mailing.
- It’s easier for people to delete an email or ignore it completely if it’s too big or contains unnecessary information (like numerous images).
What Are the Approaches to Creating Mobile Email Design?
Email is one of the most commonly used applications by smartphone users. As a result, email design for mobiles has become an important aspect of web design. Here let’s discuss the various approaches to creating mobile email design.
- Fluid design
The fluid layout uses a percent-based sizing approach, thanks to the layout of the landing pages on the desktop screen and max the adaptability to the mobile device screen. Here’s an example of how it looks:
- Scalable design
Scalable design allows the creation of the same email that works perfectly across different mobile devices. This type of design allows creating layouts with fixed width and without additional code, using a grid to align content. It also uses side-column layouts and big buttons, making it mobile friendly and popular among mobile first designs. Let’s look at the example of scalable design:
- Responsive design
Another popular design is a responsive design that uses CSS media queries to adapt the content of the email to only screen and max width. To be more precise, it changes the font size, adapts picture sizes, changes button size, and hides the least important content from the mobile version of the email design to keep it clear. Here’s an example of how responsive design works:
8 Tips You Should Use to Create Mobile-Friendy Email Designs
You should keep a few things in mind if you want to create mobile friendly email designs. From using responsive design, and keeping a subject line short, to keeping your content short and sweet, following these tips will help you create emails that mobile email clients can read and engage with no matter where they are.
- Use a responsive email template.
Your design will work fine if you’re using a desktop email client like MailChimp. But if you’re creating an email that will be opened on mobiles, it’s best to skip the traditional mobile friendly email templates and use a responsive template instead. In general, avoid designing for only one device or set of devices. Instead, focus on making sure your email looks good on all screens, especially smartphones.
- Keep it short and sweet.
Tall, wide blocks of text with big email subject lines look great on a desktop computer but are nearly impossible to read on a mobile device. Instead, try using a short subject line (25 characters or less) and then include an “Importance” header within the body of your email that indicates why the subscriber should open it (e.g., “Thanks for signing up! The sale starts today!”).
- Use large, easily readable fonts.
The same thing goes for your body text: If you can avoid it, don’t use small fonts or fancy designs in your emails. Instead, opt for a font size of 12 pixels or larger. It will make reading easier on mobile devices and ensure that your email looks great no matter what device it’s viewed on.
- Keep images to a minimum.
While large images can be a nice touch in regular emails, they often leave little room for other content when viewed on mobile devices. Instead, consider using small images that complement your content without taking up too much space in the email design. Or try responsive to screen and max width image with text wrapped around it (see tip #6).
- Use a single column layout.
Compared to a multi column layout, a single column layout is better for cellphones because it leaves plenty of room to scroll through your content without moving your finger around the screen. It’s also a good idea for single column layouts to avoid putting buttons or links at the bottom of your email; as soon as someone clicks on one, it will take them out of the email and back to their inbox in most cases.
- Use HTML and CSS to create responsive email designs.
If you’re familiar with HTML and CSS, consider using them to create a mobile responsive email design. You can use media queries in your CSS files so that the layout changes depending on whether it is desktop or mobile viewing your email. This is an easy way to make sure your mobile responsive emails work well across all devices.
- Make sure your links are easy to click on mobile screens.
When creating links in your email, make sure they are easy for mobile users to click. For example, if you have a link at the bottom of your email that takes mobile clients to a full-screen page, they may need help to reach it with their fingers and tap the link correctly. Instead, try moving important links up higher in your emails so that they can be tapped more easily by mobile users.
- Avoid using large blocks of text in the preview image area.
This is another tip for cell phones: many desktop email clients, such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail, preview your email at the top of the message. It can be difficult to read if you have large blocks of text there. Instead, use an image highlighting what’s important about your email (e.g., a sale) or display any special information that might be useful to mobile or desktop clients who open it (such as links to social media).
Conclusion
To conclude, there are a number of great ways to create positive feedback for your mobile email design. One is to use a consistent font and color scheme across all emails. Another is to make sure all your text is legible and easy to read on a small screen. And finally, make sure your images are large and easy to see. By following these tips, you’ll be able to create a great mobile email experience for your email clients.
