Email reading rates on mobile devices has seen rapid growth in the past few years. According to EmailMonday, up to 70% of emails are opened on mobile devices. It’s easy to see that mobile email is more than a trend. It’s here to stay and will continue to grow as a marketing tool. Making sure your emails are easy to view on a mobile device will greatly increase the number of people who choose to open and read it. Don’t miss out on this amazing marketing opportunity and optimize your emails with the following tips.

Use Responsive Design

Designing your email to look good on mobile devices is crucial. An email utilizing responsive design adapts itself to whatever device is being used to view it. This adaptation is triggered by media queries, which are CSS elements that assign different rules depending on the size of the screen. CSS media queries can auto-adjust the layout, content and text size of an email or website depending on the screen size of the device. Images can also be swapped out or disabled, and images and buttons can be resized and colors can be changed. If you do not know how to code, don’t worry; there are plenty of predesigned templates available for use.

Make Clicking Easy

If your call-to-action requires the reader to click something, make it easy for them. According to research by Stack Exchange, the ideal button size for a mobile device is between 45 and 57 pixels. With the popularity of touchscreen smartphones, it is important to note that people often use their thumbs to navigate. It is helpful to keep the important buttons, images, and other links within easy reach of the thumb, but also make sure to allow enough space between buttons, images, or links to avoid “mis-taps”.

Use a Single-Column Layout

Mobile emails and websites should consider using a single-column layout. It can be difficult to read a multi-column email on a small screen. Having to scroll horizontally can be annoying as well. Reading on small displays tends to work better if it is done in a linear fashion, from top-to-bottom. You can switch a multi-column design to a single-column by using media queries.

Take it Easy with the Images

When it comes to mobile optimization, do not use too many images or large files, because they will take too long to load on the mobile device. You can optimize your emails by using smaller image files. Services like JPEGmini can reduce your image file size without reducing the quality of your image. It is also important that the images that are used fit the screen size of the devices. In your email’s HTML editor, you will need to alter the style portion of the code so that your image size is defined by a proportion of the screen (i.e. 70%, 100%), rather than pixels.

Provide a Plain-text Version

It is a general best practice for CAN-SPAM compliance to create text-only versions of all your emails. This is helpful when trying to reach customers using mobile devices that do not support HTML email. These phones will automatically revert the email into a plain-text version.