3 Crucial Things to Remember Before Launching a Mobile Email Marketing Campaign

Even though the following three tips may seem obvious, surprisingly, they are often overlooked when launching a mobile email marketing campaign.

Creating a successful mobile-friendly email marketing campaign takes more than just shrinking down your design and content to fit into a tiny screen. These three tips address the functional side of mobile marketing and steer you in the right direction.

Create a mobile website

Before even thinking about launching a mobile email campaign, you must ensure that your main company website is mobile friendly.
Have you ever tried to read a non-mobile website on a mobile device? It is tricky. Not only are you forcing your customer to enlarge your page, they’re going to miss out on many things when they have to read it a little at a time.

Often what happens is that customers accidentally click on something as they try to scroll through your page or when they try to click a link, they can’t because the link is too small.
Overall the whole process becomes painful and the customer will leave for one of your competitors.
Either way, make sure you’re ready for mobile everywhere before starting.

Fingers are huge

What? You read correctly. Fingers aren’t cursors and don’t (usually) have a tiny, fine point on the end that aids in the clicking process. No, our fingers come in all shapes and sizes (unlike cursors), and are massively big in comparison to a tiny cursor.
For mobile email marketing, you have to remember how stubby our fingers are and to design accordingly. Sadly our little kids can’t do the web browsing for us.

Instead of using hyperlinked words, substitute with easy to touch icons. Any preexisting icons, like social media, have to be enlarged to accommodate.
If your links are not “finger friendly,” then don’t be surprised at how little action your emails get.

Tune up your landing page

It is supposed to be easy to navigate a site on the web or mobile device. That is a given. But all of that ease comes to a screeching halt when you land on a page with no exit, won’t load properly or requires Flash in some cases.
Keep this in mind when you’re designing your next mobile email. Landing pages are gold mines when it comes to online marketing, but on the other hand, total and complete disasters when it comes to mobile.

You may actually have to create separate landing pages for mobile marketing because your traditional landing pages may not work.

Always have a way for visitor’s to “get out” of your page, meaning, that it includes (finger friendly) links to your main website.

However, don’t rely too heavily on graphics on a mobile landing page because some devices may not be able to load them or, even worse, your visitor will have to leave because they don’t want to exceed their data limit.

Until Flash is available on all mobile devices, don’t use it either.

Launching a successful mobile email marketing campaign means thinking of every little detail when it comes to how your message will look on a tablet. The market is still growing and evolving so there is plenty of room to be creative. But you must focus on the three tips above and of course, test every part of the process.

Mobile marketing and tablets are hot right now, so the sooner you shift your focus in that direction, the better off you will be in the long run.

 

Image credits: sippakorn, Idea go & Lavoview (freedigitalphotos.net)