The design is a crucial aspect of digital marketing activities. Progress in hardware and software worlds change the way we create and deliver emails to our audiences. Especially after the mobile revolution, compatibility with different screen sizes became crucial for engagement success. As mobile use undertook the desktop use globally, almost every marketer started to plan and execute the activities including email marketing with a mobile-first state of mind. According to We Are Social and Hootsuite’s Digital in 2018 report, unique global mobile user number reached 5.1 billion. Obviously, marketers need to consider mobile compatibility at first hand.
Saying goodbye to “One size fits all” approach in Email Marketing
Today consumers use many different gadgets to access the internet and communicate with each other. Just imagine the variety of mobile phone models all around the world. They have different screen sizes, and this situation leads to arrangement needs so that designs look proper. At this very moment, responsive design enters the scene.
Responsive design is the process of making websites; emails, etc. look good on all devices. With the use of appropriate HTML, CSS, and graphic design techniques and elements, the output automatically resizes, hides, shrinks, or enlarges itself so that no matter what the gadget is the user can see a proper page and explore it without difficulty.
To put it in another way, instead of creating separate designs for different screens responsive provides optimization with special coding arrangements. As the output rearranges itself for different screen resolutions, users with different gadgets face the same experience. For the serving part, this situation eliminates the risk of displaying ugly looking and unreadable pages.
The natural evolution of responsive in email marketing
Before responsive design, we had simpler forms of emails. Some senders still use these forms. On the contrary, to attract and satisfy today’s connected consumers, responsive email has become essential.
– Plain Text Emails:
They are just plain e-mails of text. The disadvantage of this approach is that there is no visual appeal. It is almost impossible to grab the attention of consumers in the modern business world with this type.
– Visual Emails:
You may add visuality to your emails to increase attraction. If you do not care about responsive design still, there is no guarantee that your email will look proper on different screens. Mostly senders prefer to send one embedded big visual for content density and branding reasons.
However, this email route has three disadvantages:
1) Since the size of the visual is big, download problems may appear. Especially for mobile users, the internet connection speed is still an issue in many locations.
2) Due to the lack of responsive rearrangement, the visual may look so small especially in mobile gadgets. The text in the visual may become unreadable – readers need to zoom in to get a closer look. For brands, this situation may even affect the engagement in a negative way. In modern consumption world, nobody wants to make an extra effort to get details about offers and campaigns.
3) In some mail platforms, sliced images reassembled with HTML coding may look distorted according to the version of the browser used, and lines may appear at the junctions of the pieces.
Summing up the benefits of responsive emails
1) As mobile user numbers keep increasing in the world, the responsive email is the right answer for mobile compatibility.
2) Responsive emails allow text and links to be uploaded immediately even when the internet speed is weak.
3) Responsive emails use percent sizing to adjust the width of tables and images automatically based on the device’s screen size. The e-mail becomes the most legible for every screen.
4) Buttons and linked text ranges are set automatically for best the view and easily clickable on the user’s screen.
As a result, one of today’s golden rules of successful email marketing is using responsive design to ensure readability on every device.
Below you may see responsive email design examples:
Feel free to contact us for getting details about email marketing solutions including responsive design.
