Modern B2B Blogs

How Mobile Devices Affect your Email Marketing

By Kelly Abner on July 5, 2007

Just when you thought that you had your email marketing technology covered, that sending html and text versions meant that your email could be easily read by everyone in your target lists, along comes this interesting item from MarketingSherpa:

’64% of B2B decision makers read their email on mobile devices.’

That’s right… SIXTY-FOUR PERCENT. That’s a big percentage that we, as marketers, now have to consider when sending email to our lists. We saw it on a webinar, and it’s in this MarketingSherpa report.

Do you typically test your outgoing marketing emails (such as your lead nurturing pieces) on a BlackBerry, Treo or SmartPhone before sending? We decided to run an experiment here at Marketo. Jon has a Treo running PalmOS, Phil has a BlackBerry Pearl, and I have a Windows Mobile 5 SmartPhone.  (No, none of us has an iPhone yet, but hopefully its email parses html without a problem.) I created a list that included the three of us, sent a multi-part mime message to the list, and then checked each phone.

Interestingly, the BlackBerry tried to read the html, but provided the full text link information instead of just the links to click. The Palm Treo parsed the html well, but the results told us that our 2-column template (with the main text in the right column) wasn’t ideal, since the content in the left column (a couple of navigation links) was presented first. The Windows Mobile phone also did a good job with the html, but presented the same problem: the reader had to scroll down the page to see the main content.

Our results prompted us to do two things:
1) Redesign our email template to put the main content in the left column, so that it shows first on a small screen, and

2) Ensure that the template is as simple as possible. I know you’ve heard that one before (when it applies to the number of graphics and the size of the email), but it bears repeating.

Does anyone have any ideas? How have you made your emails more readable on mobile devices?