Is Your Email Mobile Ready or Simplistic?
Mobile ready email layouts are becoming more and more relevant as greater numbers of people check email on phones and tablets. But mobile ready should not be an excuse for overly simplistic layouts or sacrificing lead generation elements.
We recently spoke with a sales trainer about his email campaign. We asked him to provide us with what he was currently sending. He sent a single column layout with an article and one image.
When we asked why he was looking to do something different he told us he was getting little to no response from his email campaign. Open rates were ok but click rates or direct responses were almost non-existent. He lamented that a year ago he was consistently getting leads and feedback on his email campaign.
So we asked to see a sample of his past email from a year ago. He sent an email with a two column format with a couple promo offers in the side bar. The main section had a sample of the article which linked back to his webpage where the whole article was available. On the article webpage was another promotional offer.
What we were seeing is that this sales trainer had consistently been offering next steps in his emails which were fairly successful and then abruptly stopped. This begged the question, “Why the change?”
The response was that he had needed to change to a mobile friendly template. While that was reasonable, it didn’t explain why the promo offers had been removed. His response was, “The designer that set the email up said that the single column was mobile friendly. The content would be more convenient for my audience and doing the article entirely in the email would streamline the process of creating it by eliminating links.”
In other words, creating the email became easier but elements that had generated results in the past were eliminated. Not a good trade off.
Mobile layouts are getting more and more sophisticated and the best ones will present a custom display based on what device it is being used on. Sacrifices like layout restrictions or limiting offers are typically not necessary. If a layout is overly complex for mobile an appealing translation is often possible that includes all the original elements.
The problem is that in an effort to make emails easy to create, many platforms are restricting layout options so that the layout can be billed as “mobile ready”. Successful elements from an email campaign should not be sacrificed in the name of mobile. A simplistic email is not the right option for an email campaign just because it’s mobile ready.
If you have an email campaign that needs upgraded to a mobile ready version, make a list of the elements that are generating results. That becomes your non-negotiable list of things that have to be included. As you set out a new layout make sure that the layout accommodates those things. After all, what’s the point of an email that displays well on mobile devices if it stops serving the business purpose?