I’m sure by now you have heard of responsive email design. The ability to make sure your emails come across in the best possible way no matter what device your audience is using. But how can you do this if you’re not familiar with HTML code or designing emails? Don’t worry, we’ve got the 3 top tips here.
1 – Plain Text Emails Are Your Friend
Now, according to recent HubSpot research, most users CLAIM they prefer pretty HTML design emails. But in every A/B test they did with plain text-based emails vs html-based emails, plain text won. In fact, they found that the heavier the graphic design was, the lower the email open rate. HTML design even had a lower click-through rate, all because of one simple reason. Emails are a 1-2-1 interaction with the reader. The simpler the message, the faster it came across and the more likely users were to act on it.
Here at CommuniGator, we’ve found that plain text emails also look better in our preview, no matter what device we use. The email comes from a personal account and the first line makes it clear that it is a personal written email, something our audience engages with. So the simplest way to optimise your email is to keep it as plain as possible and stick to text wherever you can. If you’re having trouble making the written word as powerful as it can be, we teach the best practices for powerful content writing here.
2 – Remember, Size Matters!
If you’ve ever had an image that was too large for your mobile, you’ll know how awful the user experience was. That’s why it’s important to adjust the size of your email images to get the best possible outcome. The larger the image the slower your email will load, and you don’t want that.
If you don’t have responsive fluid images, you can do this in your email HTML editor. All you need to do is change the image size based on the proportion of the screen. For example, set the width of the image to 80% and the height to auto so that your image will automatically adjust to the size of the screen.
The same goes for your links and call to action buttons! Make sure they are big enough that your users can click on them easily and fit the screen by changing the email HTML code.
3 – Use a Responsive Template
Most of your email clients are not experts in HTML and CSS and can have trouble formatting, let’s be honest. Talk to them about media queries, fluid grids and fluid images and you’ll get a blank face back at you.
For the record: responsive design will arrange the layout of your email in a way that all the important information is readable and user-friendly. Fluid grids and images adjust according the to code. Media queries detect the screen size of a device and turn on a specific set of “rules” based on that screen size.
To simplify that for your email clients, you should use responsive email templates that have the media queries and fluid grids/images already in place. Then it is just a matter of testing the email on different devices and apps to see how they come across. Remember, different apps support different media queries, so it is more important to test the apps such as Outlook, Apple Mail and Mailbox rather than the devices.
Are you ready to start using the architecture of an outstanding email design?
Better yet, why not check out this guide we created on making a highly effective B2B email marketing campaign?
