By David Clemen – Director of Digital Marketing, MDR
I hosted a webinar that highlighted the findings of MDR’s Digital Trends in the Education Market report, which reveals the reality of educator interaction with digital marketing in email, web ads, and social media. We gathered insights from almost 400,000,000 deployed email across almost 20,000 unique email campaigns.
What do the numbers tell us?
One of the biggest takeaways for me is the importance of mobile-friendly email design.
Here are two graphs that tell the story.
Graph A
In graph A we are looking at total opens of emails by device type. We really don’t see anything too shocking. If you look at how traffic is broken up between devices whether you look at a website, advertising, or email promotion you typically see this type of distribution. Desktop/Laptop and Mobile devices taking up the lion’s share of traffic with a small percentage being taken by tablets.
Graph B
This is where it gets interesting. In graph B look at how the clicks on those emails are broken out. Although Desktop/Laptop devices account for 50.21% of all opens they are responsible for 90.85% of all clicks.
What does this suggest?
To me this really drives home the importance of mobile friendly email design. With the hundreds of clients that I work with directly for their promotional email deployments this is where I often see the biggest room for improvement and the above numbers back that up.
Here are some quick tips for mobile friendly design that you can implement today without being a design or HTML expert.
- Keep it Simple: Complex HTML, tables, and multiple links in close proximity are all challenges on a mobile device. Remember that the reader is “clicking” with a thumb or finger. Make sure it’s easy for recipients to read your copy and click on links, buttons, etc. Single column email designs work really well.
- Get that Click: The goal of most emails is to encourage a click. Try to place the call to action above the fold, and button sizes should at least 44 x 44px in dimension to make easily clickable by a thumb. Anything smaller can be a challenge for a reader to easily click with a finger or thumb.
- Size Does Matter: Font size of your copy should never be less than 14 pixels. 12 pixels or less can be extremely hard to read on a mobile device. Always test what your email looks like on a mobile device before sending out to your list.
You can get a more comprehensive list of how to optimize your email promotions for mobile devices in the Digital Trends Report, or from one of our upcoming webinars.
Don’t just take my word for it. Test, Test, Test!
With so many devices and different formats across all of these devices, there is no magic format or design spec. iOS behaves quite differently than Android devices, so testing is critical. Send test emails to co-workers who can open the email on several types of devices.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. Share some of your digital trends insights below!
About David Clemen
With over 17 years of experience in business development, operations, advertising, and marketing, David possesses a deep repertoire of revenue-building skills and strategies. Proficient in the full gamut of paid advertising platforms and a sought-after expert in e-commerce, social media, and email marketing, he has developed high-margin marketing programs and increased market penetration and ROI for clients across a diverse spectrum of industries.
