While the giants of Silicon Valley confidently anticipated the proliferation of internet back in the nineties, they could have hardly imagined how quickly and efficiently the ways of doing business would expand to our mobile phones.

The emergence of touchscreen tech and its wholehearted embrace into mainstream certainly helped the matter, but the transitional process of web browsing from desktops to mobile screens was far from smooth. The question of formatting and optimization was raised and many concessions had to be made to enable efficient email marketing on smartphones. Here’s how its future will look and how to optimize it most efficiently for mobile phones.

The Future of Email Marketing:

How to Optimize For Mobile Devices

The future looks solid

Nobody will blame you if you think methods such as email marketing are antiquated. It has been a tried and true practice of raising awareness and selling products since the times of fledgling internet, and it appears that this robust method proves to be reliable no matter the stage of web & multimedia development.

About 2.5 billion people worldwide use email, so it is a potent ground for acquiring customers. As a matter of fact, you can acquire 40 times more customers by relying on email marketing and get a staggering 4400% ROI.

When you take a glance at such factoids, it should take you less than a second to consider whether to invest in email marketing, no matter how small a business you run. In terms of time and money (or better yet, no-money) invested, the pay off almost seems to be ridiculous.

Use mobile-ready templates and landing pages

To put it simply, it is all about format and versatility. Your marketing efforts will have to look appealing on any screen, and since an ever-expanding percentage of people opt to check their mail on mobile devices, investing into mobile-ready templates may be a good investment into the future.

The same goes for the landing page, as visitation to it is only a natural next step in the process. Many savvy programmers will know how to code these templates and landing pages just right, so hiring one such individual as a part-time member of the marketing team can also pay off. The bottom line is to show visual and textual content that can elegantly stack on top of each other without sacrificing the readability of the material. After all, the potentially minuscule size of the screen has to be taken into consideration, which naturally brings us to the next point.

Always think about image and font size-ratio

By now, it would be frivolous to discuss in-depth about the decreasing attention spans of web-dwellers. You have precious few seconds to grab their attention and circa 50 seconds at most to keep their interest if we are discussing material akin to a newsletter. Since the human brain tends to latch on visual impressions, you’d be well-advised to use compelling and thematically appropriate images, accompanied by the font that is easy on the eyes.

Keep images simple – no vectors, statistics or hard-coded text, and make an extra effort to be succinct with your textual content. This way, the message of the image will be clear and it will not compete with the textual content for space on a small screen.

The subject line and ‘From’ name tweaks

Short and sweet should be your mantra when it comes to email marketing in general, let alone pitches that should be read on a portable device. Keep your subject line brief, the last thing you need is to have a statement that disappears behind three dots on a portable device. Going over 30 characters is not advised, so practice your marketing ‘haiku’.

You should also ponder on the ‘From’ name and see to it that it represents exactly what the target customers expect. The brand name usually trumps personal name, and even if the latter is preferable, keep it under 23 characters. If you tackle this small detail effectively and combine it with effective email marketing automation, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

Preheader text needs to be gripping

With so many titles, headers and preheaders that need to be taken into consideration, it may become quite a handful to micromanage every singular character for the sake of proper mobile-device optimization, but you need to persevere with this practice.

Only then will it become a routine that’s not as hard on your marketing team. With that in mind, the preheader text is there to summarize the ‘selling point’ of the email to your subscriber in the precise and effective way, and even though some devices can show up to 90 characters of the preheader, you should consider the worst-case scenario and keep it around 45 characters long. You can also use the proximity of the subject line to continue the enticing elaboration that has begun with the subject line’s hook for maximum impact. It’s all about making the best out of a small space that you’ve been working with.

It’s not only that people prefer to view their emails on portable devices these days – one also has to account for the increase of all web-related activities on smartphones, including the ever-growing trend of doing crucial business over mobile devices. The key then becomes efficient optimization for comprehensible layout and functional efficiency.

It’s all about opting for the top apps that serve their purpose. Streamlining of the process will come naturally since handling business and other important matters is much easier due to the industry’s focus on user-friendliness.