• by Kam Wa Tang , April 16, 2013

Mobile-enabled email has truly been the topic du jour for 2013 so far. A recent article says it best in its title: “Mobile Email Opens Now 41% & on Pace to Surpass PC by End of 2013.” Whoa, that’s huge!.

So that’s the “why” of using mobile email; now let’s focus on the “how.”  There are three components that marketers should consider when creating mobile emails:

1. Have a good frame of reference for what successful mobile email design should look like.
2. Know what components will make your email campaigns successful in a mobile format based on your unique audience, product, and marketing goals.
3. Determine what mobile email design is right for your campaigns (responsive, scalable, hybrid?).

It’s really about your ability to communicate your differentiators in the concise and highly efficient manner mobile email design dictates. For example, if you rely on customer feedback to improve your products or use it as a way to market to them, you may use surveys frequently in your emails – something that should be reflected in a mobile environment. Similarly, if you utilize video in your emails, this component should be made fully usable in a mobile format.

On a different note, the type of mobile design you choose depends exclusively on whom you’re trying to reach, and what device they use: If the majority of your mobile opens happen on an iPhone, you may choose responsive design while if your mobile subscribers use predominantly Android, Windows or Blackberry devices, you may opt for scalable design. At the same time, if you’re committed to the best possible user experience, your best bet may be a hybrid mobile design that displays optimally on any device, regardless of operating system. Similarly, the type of functionality you use in your emails depends exclusively on what your emails aim to achieve. Below are some capabilies of mobile email design that can help you introduce custom design elements in your emails, based on your call-to-actions.

• Poll: An interactive poll that shows results on a custom landing page
• Status Bar: Visual cue to display user progress or time remaining withing a service provided
• Video: A pseudo video player, which clicks through to an autoplay video landing page
• Social Excerpts: Social content (like tweets, photos or comments) that are pulled right into the message
• Catch-all Bottom Navigation: Helps get clicks to other category levels with a series of links at the bottom
• Click-to-Launch App: A call to action that launches a smartphone app or desktop application.
• Mobile Click-to-Call: Allows smartphone users to click-to-call