Mobile Email Marketing Checklist

MOBILE EMAIL MARKETING CHECK LIST www.artegic.net 01 MOBILE EMAIL MARKETING No technology in the past has been able to record similar contents on mobile end devices complicate the practical growth as mobile communication. By 2010 there will be execution. Email marketers always need to keep an overview more than 923 million mobile phone accounts in Europe and in order to adapt email content and formatting to the requi- worldwide over 2.7 billion. In many European countries, rements of the end devices and their browsers. such as Italy, Spain, the UK and Germany, the number of mobile phone accounts alreadz exceeds the number of inha- Important criteria are the number of displayable characters bitants. The mobile phone therefore beats the spread of any for email subject and readability of the content, the ability other type of information media. of displaying HTML, as well as the possibility to edit content. These parameters depend on the operating system of the The growing number of internet compatible mobile and mobile end device, as well as the email client and browser. smart phones, as well as decreasing mobile internet tariffs And last but not least, they also depend on the settings of make email marketing more and more attractive in view of the individual recipients. mobile target groups. The purely technical ability of sending emails to mobile end devices is only the precondition - not In a study, artegic has examined the presentability of emails the uniqueness - of mobile email marketing. In practice, we on different end devices. You can download this study at can clearly distinguish between classical email marketing www.mobile-email-studie.de. and the subdiscipline of mobile email marketing. In the present check list we have gathered the most im- Firstly, because the special usage preferences of mobile re- portant do‘s and don‘ts for practical tasks in mobile email cipients must be taken into account, and secondly, because marketing. technical restrictions in the display of emails and web 02 CHECK LIST Previous to further plans, it should generally be ana- Think of the special usage preferences of mobile users. lysed what percentage of the relevant target group Newsletters, for example, are rarely read on a mobile uses email on the move. This may be done through a device. Up-to-date service mails or mails, which can be customer survey, voting via a website, or the analysis used for later reference (e.g. appointments or travel of the user agents within server protocols. Some email details) however, are adapted to the application envi- marketing solutions, such as ELAINE, directly offer the ronment. The same applies for compact notifications, detection of mobile recipients. which can serve as access to further information on the mobile web during waiting or idle times. Depending on the target group, it may be worth asking about mobile email use during the newsletter subscrip- When texting subject line and sender name, special tion and offering another format for mobiles and PDAs attention should be paid to the first few characters. in addition to text and HTML. If the demand is suf- The displayable number of characters depends on the ficient, a separate newsletter, which is optimised for individual device and ranges from 6 to 93 characters. mobile end devices, may subsequently be sent. The objective is to capture the recipient’s interest with the first words in the subject line. Therefore, start the In general, you should always offer an additional text subject line with important keywords and call-to-action version of the newsletter, as many mobile end devices elements. Avoid redundancies in sender names and at only display HTML emails incompletely or not at all. the beginning of the subject line, in order not to waste In any case, there should be the option to access the valuable characters. HTML version as a „website“ via a link, as the device‘s own web browsers mostly come with more comprehen- sive HTML display capabilities than the email client. Especially in the context of existing corporate design (CD) requirements, it is recommended to test how a newsletter will be displayed on mobile end devices (Blackberry, Symbian OS, Windows Mobile) and com- mon browsers (Opera Mini). Emails are often not read completely, but only browsed through. This is even more relevant to mobile emails, as bad the presentability is very limited due to the size of the display (mostly 240 x 320 pixels). When targeted emails are sent to mobile end devices, the text should not exceed more than two or three paragraphs. 03 good The number of characters for links should be kept to Offer mobile users an alternative back channel, as a minimum, so they display correctly, even on small there is only limited access – if any – to the web on the displays. Unlike with HTML emails, in text emails, a link road. It may be useful to place the telephone number in character string cannot be hidden in code and over- a prominent position in the email. Many mobile pho- flows the small mobile screen. nes offer the option to export a phone number from an email directly into the address book or immediately As always, the following applies: The most important trigger an SMS. information should be above the fold, i.e. the recipient should be able to read it without having to scroll down. It is useful to create landing pages suitable for mobile In the mobile context this means: The first two to three end devices. These should not contain any JavaScript, sentences should contain the most important informati- as many mobile browsers do not support it. Further on, as on a mobile screen only the first 100 characters more, for the layout, you should bear in mind the limi- or 20-25 words are visible. ted display size (mostly 240 pixels). In cases, where the exact mobile model of the user is known, a browser Many newsletters start with a reference to an alter- sniffer can deliver differently formatted content, or native online display. In the text version, the reference even content coded in WAP or CHTML by means of CSS. texts and the mostly long technical link uses up a lot of valuable area, which then cannot be used otherwise. Mobile landing pages or mobile-compatible websites Try to keep the text and link brief and where applicable, should abstain from complex inputs, such as forms. refer directly to a mobile-compatible online version These features are a high hurdle for many mobile of the email. This can be linked separately, or chosen phones and mobile users. If possible, work with simple automatically via a browser sniffer, which identifies the selection inputs. mobile access. Some email marketing solutions, such as ELAINE, come with this feature. 04 Mobile users on the road usually have poor light condi- Not all emails are read on a mobile device. (In fact, it is tions, no defined distance to the monitor and no mouse an art to achieve mobile reading of emails.) Newslet- for input. In order to improve the convenience of mobile ters or graphically large emails may be received on a end devices, when creating HTML emails or landing pa- mobile, but only read later on a PC. It is therefore not ges, you should bear in mind colour contrasts and large always necessary to design every email communication navigation elements. for mobiles. However, keep in mind: The relevance from the subject and the first visible content may decide Mobile data transfer is slower and more expensive. whether your message will grab enough attention to be Limited band width and higher latency make wireless read on a PC later. As with emails which are fully opti- data transfer generally slower compared with the mised for mobile reading, use the sender, subject and earth-bound version. The selection of photos, graphics the first lines (e.g. before the graphic email header) to or even videos should therefore be carefully consi- tackle the interest, so the email will not be immediately dered, since the transfer of this data uses additional deleted as irrelevant. valuable data volume included in the mobile phone plan. A  n interesting alternative to mobile emails are mobile You should check whether the subscriber can unsub- RSS feeds. RSS accommodates the requirements of scribe from the newsletter while on the road. If the compact information even more than email.