Mobile marketing firm Knotice observed that 41% of marketing emails are opened on a mobile device, a trend that continues to grow. Are you thinking about this when sending out your newsletters or other marketing material?

Retailers are striving to make their online sites mobile friendly. This includes building a mobile version of the site or launching a shopping app for your smartphone or tablet. However, many overlook how marketing emails appear on a mobile device. Newsletters tend to drive high traffic with each mailing. But could traffic be even higher if the newsletters also cater to mobile devices?

I briefly just went through a bunch of marketing emails on my phone comparing how they display and what sort of download needs to occur for me to see the entire message and pictures. Some were decent. Many had a single picture, or multiple graphics tied together making a single picture, which created one large sale advertisement. The basic layout will render nicely in mobile email clients. However, others did not render well at all. For instance, a local car dealership’s weekly newsletter rendered absolutely horrendous. It had many columns with squished text forcing the email to be quite long in scrolling through. I would not sit through on my mobile phone and scroll through that message to see what they are trying to tell me.

So how do we get our marketing messages through to our mobile users? Well, basic advertisements asking the user to click to see the sale will render nicely on all devices. But are you sending a mobile phone user the same high resolution graphic you are sending your desktop client user? And is a mobile user likely to wait click and ask that image to download to see what it is? With the local car dealership, if they want to feed all that information to me, they might want to take a responsive design approach so it would format nicely across different screen sizes. The design would just have to be kept simple and not rely on JavaScript as email clients do not execute JavaScript. Simple is a good thing anyways. You want to catch the user’s eye immediately without scrolling through or requesting to download the entire email. Also to consider, one might put text advertising what the email is about encouraging the mobile device user to download the pictures in the email. Headlines are important.

Lastly, when the user clicks the links in the email, it better go to a mobile friendly site, or else you may lose that customer rather quickly if it’s difficult to browse.

Source: Internet Retailer: 41% of marketing e-mails are opened on mobile devices