• IPG Emerging Media Lab Blog, Thursday, December 3, 2009 2:17 PM

Josh Lovison, Interpublic Emerging Media Lab Mobile and Gaming Practice Lead, argues that email marketers are unknowingly in a dire situation. Why? A major activity for smartphone users involves checking email, and, while current best practices dictate formatting emails to support both text-only and HTML email clients, HTML versions don't scale well to smaller devices. Text only is one solution, but, says Lovison, just removing horizontal width fixed elements can improve things dramatically without compromising aesthetics too greatly.

More clever marketers, meanwhile, may want to look into detecting "User-Agents" for hosted images and, based off those, assign "lowest common denominator" support for those users' email addresses. Bottom line, as the smartphone share of the wireless market expands, emails that fail to get it right will, figuratively speaking, fail to deliver for an ever greater number of recipients.

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