The Challenges of Mobile Marketing
Every so often a new buzz word or phrase enters the digital landscape and we get calls from clients asking us what the new word actually means and how it impacts on their own digital channel.
The latest one that I get asked about most often is Mobile Marketing, with specific references to emailing to mobile!
To be honest there is no definitive answer as to ‘How best to tackle emailing to mobile?’ because different smart phones present different issues.
The iPhone has excellent email rendering to the point where an email will look the same on an iPhone as it would on a desktop PC…The Blackberry on the other hand has dreadful email rendering…as my MD Roz found out at the weekend.
It’s virtually impossible to create an email in HTML that will look great on all smartphones as the pixel width on each is different.
The only way to create an email that will look ok in all smartphones is to send a text email…however this has obvious visual drawbacks. The alternative to send a HTML email, and then follow it up with a text version for those on smartphones, however this is just sending the same message twice which can be annoying for your recipients.
So what are your options?
Well you could add a link to the top of your emails that says ‘Viewing on a Smartphone? Click Here’ and that could link to a version of the email optimized for a smaller screen. You could pick the most popular smartphone (Now the Samsung Galaxy S II according to moneyhighstreet.com) and base the pixel width on that smartphone. Alternatively you could just link to a hosted Web version (which you should be doing already) as most smartphones have excellent web browsing software.
Secondly, and again this is best practice so you should be doing it already, as long as you are hard coding everything within your email in basic html and avoiding shortcuts and CSS (div tags, style sheets, span class tags) then you are giving your emails every chance of appearing as they should in most smartphones.
Despite all this buzz there is a general acceptance that email browsing on a mobile is not brilliant, and most recipients will wait until they are at a desktop PC to evaluate an email properly if it is of genuine interest.
P-J - Head Of Creative And Strategic Development
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