Making your messaging mobile friendly: 3 tips to effectively reach all of your readers

Where does mobile friendliness rank on your list of things to consider when creating HTML emails? For most people, it’s probably somewhere below avoiding spam filters, creating a compelling subject line, getting your message across, etc. Or maybe it’s not even on your list at all…

With the popularity of smartphones growing by the day, it’s hard to ignore the fact that many people may never see your message on an actual computer. That means mobile friendliness should be at the TOP of your list. So let’s talk about how to create a mobile friendly message.

One easy way to make a message display uniformly on computers AND mobile is to create two versions of your message, a regular version and a mobile version. Send out the regular version, with a link at the top that says “click here to view mobile version” (which can be housed on your web site). Whether you choose to go this route, or decide to only create one version, here are three tips to make any message mobile friendly:

• Keep your width as narrow as possible. This is not to say that your actual email has to be the width of a smart phone screen, but keep it as narrow as reasonably possible. This will make your message more readable for smartphone users because they won’t have to scroll horizontally as much. Only having one column is ideal as well.
• Use large text in the body of your message. Smart phone screens are fairly small, so make sure your text is large enough for your recipient to read without having to zoom in a lot, if you don’t want all of your text to be large, at least make sure the most important points are large and noticeable.
• Do you have a donate or signup button in your message (or even a text link)? Make sure any type of link is easily clickable on a touch screen. Many graphic links show up too small to be clicked by a fingertip. Make sure you don’t have clickable items too close to each other as this may cause the recipient to click the wrong thing and become frustrated.

So there you have it! What tips would you add to this list for making your email campaigns mobile friendly?