• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 4, 2009

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 on smaller devices such as iPhones and Droids. The obvious risk is that as smartphones continue to proliferate, emails that fail to get it right will, figuratively speaking, fail to deliver for an ever greater number of recipients.

Online Media Daily: What's the most blatant example of this problem?

Lovison: Ironically, Apple's own iPhone is a great example. Unless people have been using text only, with a graphic here or there, they've most likely established a graphical header, or formatted the email with a fixed width, and the text should be pretty impossible to read.

OMD: Another irony, as you've explained, is that email marketers doing the best job graphically with their emails are the ones facing the biggest issue. What do you mean?

Lovison: Generally, existing best practices for formatting are getting them in trouble.

OMD: Why can't marketers rely on text-only emails?

Lovison: They can. It would work perfectly, but it doesn't look professional or very aesthetically pleasing.

OMD: What about removing horizontal-width fixed elements?

Lovison: That's the key problem, really. If they remove that, their problems are almost completely solved.

OMD: Can you explain the idea of detecting "User-Agents" for hosted images, and based off those, assigning "lowest common denominator" support for those users' email addresses?

Lovison: Most of the best email marketers can set this up. The idea is adding an additional option to their database for smartphone downloading on the back end.

OMD: Does Android present unique challenges with regard to this issue?

Lovison: The basic challenges and solutions are the same, except for slight changes to the user experience. The big issue is that the small screens are scaling so that the small print is unreadable.

OMD: Have you spotted any marketers that are already on top of this potentially crippling issue?

Lovison: It's not something that you would notice. In some cases, marketers are just less advanced, which in this case has worked out in their favor.