MarketingSherpa Blog

If your experience is anything like the typical email marketer in 2014, a growing portion (possibly a very large percentage) of your list is opening email on a mobile device — maybe a tablet or, more likely, one of the many smartphones out there.

To fully reach and engage that audience, you can either design and build custom emails for every single platform your audience is using …

Or, to make things a bit simpler on the design and execution end of things, take the responsive design plunge for all your email campaigns to ensure your sends have the best look, feel and, more importantly, clickability on any mobile (or non-mobile) platform your recipients use.

To address this issue, watch this excerpt from a panel discussion at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014:

This excerpt features Pamela Jesseau, Senior Director of Marketing, MECLABS (parent company of MarketingSherpa); Amy Carpenter, Digital Marketing Team Leader, Whole Foods Market; and Ewa Badaruk, Global eCRM Marketing Manager, adidas Group.

Some of the key takeaways are:

• Start with segmented campaigns based on the customer’s experience
• “Thinking mobile” can help you prioritize your content
• There’s nothing wrong with starting small when developing a responsive email strategy
• If your list is global, make sure it makes sense to spend time and money on responsive design for certain regions or markets
• Understand what email type — transactional, promotional, etc. — is best to optimize for mobile based on your list (and your metrics)
• Don’t forget about the mobile optimized landing page for clickthrough

Although this excerpt provides some great actionable ideas, I highly suggest watching the entire 45-minute presentation to get a great overview on this very important, and current, topic in email marketing.

Please share your experience dealing with your list opening email in the comments, and be sure to include which platforms and devices were involved.

We’d love to hear about what you are doing to meet this challenge.

You might also like

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 [Want to see more insightful presentations like this one? Book your ticket now and save $700 before September 18, 2014, with the VIP Discount.]

Email Marketing: 24% higher CTR for CareerBuilder’s responsive design [Case study]

Why Responsive Design Does Not Care About Your Customers [More from the blogs]

Mobile Marketing: E-commerce site uses responsive design to achieve an 8% lift in cart abandonment campaign [Case study]

B2B Web Optimization: 140% surge in mobile transactions through responsive design effort [Case study]

About David Kirkpatrick

David is a reporter for MarketingSherpa and has over twenty years of experience in business journalism, marketing and corporate communications. His published work includes newspaper, magazine and online journalism; website content; full-length ghosted nonfiction; marketing content; and short fiction. He served as producer for the business research horizontal at the original Office.com, regularly reporting on the world of marketing; covered a beat for D/FW TechBiz, a member of the American City Business Journals family; and he provided daily reporting for multiple LocalBusiness.com cities. David’s other media and corporate clients include: USA Today, Oxford Intelligence, GMAC, AOL, Business Development Outlook and C-Level Media, among many others.

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Categories: Email Marketing Tags: Email Marketing, mobile marketing, responsive design, smartphone, subscriber list, tablet