It’s the end of the first week after the Olympic high: Londoners awaiting the second influx of athletes pause for breath; super humans across the globe cram in a frantic fortnights training before it’s their turn in the spotlight; politicians feeling the pressure talk of legacy and continuation while we at Intela continue to do what we do best – send emails….
At Intela, email for mobile is undergoing scrutiny like never before. We’ve recruited Guénolé Le Gall as our Head of Mobile, and for some months now we’ve been analysing, designing, building, sending and more analysing.
An incredibly high proportion of our database views their email on a smart phone – something like 60% in the UK, Spain and the Netherlands. Perhaps unsurprisingly, iPhone is by far the most popular of the smart phones in all three countries.
For my part I’ve been looking at the CSS Media Query and putting together a specification that incorporates this for optimum cross-client compatibility. For the email designer this causes problems and provides opportunity in approximately equal amounts but my main tip would be to keep it simple.
The key to mobile email is to include only the most important information in the mobile version – this makes for quicker rendering and easier reading.
With this in mind, the easiest way to design email that will render on both mobile and desktop devices is to follow a two column format where one column = 2/3, and one column = 1/3. Put all your key information in the wider column and simply assign a CSS class with display=none to the narrow column that you want to hide on mobile devices.
Of course, it can get a lot more complex than this but follow this simple format and you will have a 400px width creative for mobile and 600px width creative for large screen devices with the minimum of coding hassle.
To discuss how Intela can help your mobile strategy you can contact Guénolé directly on guenole.legall@intela.com
Post by: Stuart Page, Senior Email Analyst
