Responsive email: Can your customers read what you send them?
With the majority of email now being read on a mobile device, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your HTML newsletters, autoresponders and mailshots are ‘responsive’ or at the very least ‘mobile-aware’.
At the end of 2013, over half of all email ‘opens’ were done so via a mobile device [source Litmus]. This means that if you’re still using templates that don’t cater for mobile, you’re losing out … big time.
A nice, easy-to-read template is essential to make sure your readers aren’t immediately deleting your broadcasts because they don’t render properly. Not only that, a good responsive email template will offer other benefits such as increased click rate, which means more traffic, conversions and revenue.
How do I go responsive?
The easiest and most effective way of doing this for web and app-based email is to get yourself a responsive template. However, support in both mobile and desktop email clients is still limited, which kind of makes it a pain.
Many of the most popular mass email solutions already offer built-in responsive templates. These might be recent inclusions so it’s worth logging in and having a flick through your template galleries to see if there’s a nice responsive design you can use.
If you’re looking at creating your own custom template, there are a few good places to start.
- The How-To Guide to Responsive Email Design
- Building responsive 2-to-1 column layouts
- How to create a responsive HTML email from scratch
And some good (backward compatible) frameworks, which are supported by ALL major email clients …
- INK by Zurb – Quickly create responsive HTML emails that work on any device & client. Even Outlook.
- Antwort – Originally made for transactional Emails with dynamic content so the layouts are thoroughly tested – in live environments with real data and edge cases.
