Why should you send mobile friendly newsletters?

Over half of emails are read on mobile devices, rather than desktop so it’s really important to make sure your emails are optimised for mobile users.

But what does optimising actually mean?

Optimising your newsletters for mobile means that they are easy to read and use for those on mobile devices. And even more so, that they are designed for mobile first (seeing as most emails are read on mobiles, rather than desktops), and theres various things to think about when thinking mobile first.

Layout

What does your email look like in a single-column view? Do the images/ text and buttons sit in an order that makes sense? Often when you’re using a mix of prebuilt layouts and blocks containing images, copy or buttons, they don’t show on mobile in the order you expect. When you’re building your newsletter, check the preview section - flick over to mobile preview to see what it looks like and rearrange your elements as necessary.

Readability

Remember that your email is going to be read on a teeny smart phone, not the desktop screen you’ve built it on. Make sure the font size is suitable and readable on a mobile screen. While we are talking fonts - stick to the standard fonts within your email builder - adding your custom fonts is pretty pointless, unless all of your email subscribers also have your brand font loaded on their devices. Hint here, they don’t. If you want to use a swirly font as a header, I’d suggest using an image instead, which leads me to….

Check that the images aren’t telling the whole story

If you remove the images does your newsletter still make sense? If your email is downloaded in a low wifi zone, the images may not appear. A blank email is not very powerful.

Don’t be tempted to include large graphic portions within your email (I’ve seen someone suggest using Canva to import an entire email design into Mailchimp - just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should). I have another blog post about that.

While we are talking images - make sure you’ve compressed them so they don’t take an age to load (or worse still, make your email go straight to the junk box).

Also - add clickable links to all images - users expect to be able to click on a graphic.

Make Links easy to click on

Teeeny one word links are really tricky to click on at the best of times, and almost impossible to click on on a mobile device. Add links to a few words, or better still, use buttons.

LIKE THIS ONE

Above the fold content

Do you have a call to action above the fold? Your customer should be able to easily identify what you want them to do, and have a clickable link in the first scroll of the email. Add embedded links to any images within your newsletter, including the header./ footer.

Test your email

Don’t forget to preview and send test emails. Check your test emails on both mobile and desktop platforms before you send it. This gives you the opportunity to check any links, and content blocks and you get a preview of how your email will look in the inbox. Check that your subject line and preview copy are readable and as punchy as possible.

If you would like help building an optimised newsletter template, drop me a line, I’d love to help you.

I'D LIKE HELP WITH NEWSLETTERS

Barbara