More than half of all email opens we see are now on mobile devices, not just for the cool young peoples brands but for pretty much everyone – mobile has overtaken the desktop and the trend is continuing. Every retail and travel client we work with see over 50% of their emails opened on mobile devices, so why do so many businesses continue to send emails which, on a phone don’t render properly, with text too small to read and images that aren’t optimised? Why do they make it difficult to tap links, make their customers do the finger and thumb wave to read their message, pixelate their images and get lost in their copy? In essence why are they saying;  ‘you need to work harder to do the things we want you to do and, along with over half our data, need to make more of an effort to engage with us’.

The ‘why’, of course, is clear; because they are time poor, they don’t have the resource and optimising email for mobile devices is a skill they are finding difficult to get to grips with. How this translates to us as recipients of these emails is that these companies and brands are too lazy to provide a good user experience, that doing what they’ve always done is good enough under the circumstances – after all, email is still generating revenue. Will they find the time to do things properly when they see the performance of their email dwindling and the competition grabbing their market share?

Giving your user a good experience is the cornerstone of user engagement, user engagement is the cornerstone of good email delivery, good email delivery is the cornerstone of good ROI and good ROI is the cornerstone to keeping your job. If you don’t start designing and building responsive emails your customers will stop engaging and will spend their money elsewhere.

So what are the pro’s and cons of taking the time and effort to design for the user and not for the resource constraints?

Pro’s
Emails look great on mobile devices
Increased user engagement
Brand loyalty
Reduced list churn
Increased inbox delivery
Higher click or tap throughs
Increased ROI

Con’s
Possible brand compromise
Increased resource cost

If we investigate these things further;

Emails look great on mobile devices – Kudos all round, your customers like it and may show their friends, your boss likes it and talks it up at management meetings, your colleagues like it and you feel great at work and your competition are impressed by your knowledge and skills.

Increased user engagement – Email delivery is all about sender reputation and nothing ranks higher with the ISP’s than user engagement. The more your users open and ‘tap’ your emails, the bigger improvements you will see for delivery speeds and inbox placement for all your users.

Brand loyalty – If you deliver quality content that is clear and easy to understand then human nature dictates we will engage with you more.

Reduced list churn – Acquiring data costs money. Only you will know the cost of a new record but that number will tell you the value of keeping that user on your list and engaged.

Increased inbox delivery – More emails delivered to the inbox equals more opens, more clicks/taps, more revenue, better engagement and better list hygiene.

Higher click or tap throughs – In addition to the above, better design, clear and easy to read content increases the number of clicks and taps back to your web site.

Increased ROI – The raison d’etre for all email marketing; get everything above right and continue the great user experience site-side with a good mobile website and revenues will rise and loyalty increase.

As for the cons;

Possible brand compromise – it’s true that sometimes you will have to make slight brand compromises for emails that utilise responsive design. Fonts may need to change so they are web safe and text removed from images. However, by making these compromises you can make the font live, so that when it renders on a device it increases in size making it easier for the user to read and engage with. Remeber, to read text on an image when it shrinks on a small screen, it will pixelate as the user expands the image to try and read it and that is surely worse than using a web safe font.

Increased resource cost – designing and building response emails can take a little longer and require a different approach as well as a new set of skill and this resource could cost you half a day of one of your peoples time or one of our peoples time,  so there is an increased budgetary consideration. Of course, the best responsive email in the World won’t generate better revenues than the best offer in the World but in combining the two we have seen client revenues increase 47% over a six month period with the only year-on-year change being ALL their emails are now responsive. For the same client we have also seen list growth and a dramatic reduction in data churn. The opportunity cost of not designing and coding correctly far out ways the actual cost of doing things right.

Which means if we look at this again

Pro’s
Emails look great on mobile devices
Increased user engagement
Brand loyalty
Reduced list churn
Increased inbox delivery
Higher click or tap throughs
Increased ROI
Possible brand compromise
Increased resource cost

Con’s
None

So, come on marketers, give your customers the user experience they deserve and they will love your emails for longer.