With the sharp rise in the number of users accessing email via their mobile devices (growth of 36% in the past year) marketers need to prepare themselves so that their campaigns will be mobile-ready and usable by subscribers with mobile devices.

Due to the small screen size, marketers are going to have to do more with less. Along with a small display area, marketers will have to consider other strategic and technical best practices when upgrading their campaigns to perform properly on the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Windows mobile platforms and other devices.

Here’s a list of 5 tactics to help you get your email campaigns mobile ready:

1. Write Short Subject Lines
Write subject lines of 5 or 6 words or less. That’s all that displays in most mobile displays (see image), so anything more than that runs off the screen. This offers very little room to be creative, so get to the point.

2. Rethink Your Pre-Header
On most mobile devices the pre-header or opening email text will display below the subject line (see the 2 lines of gray text below the from name and subject line). Take advantage of this by mentioning your offer or other important information here. It can compliment the subject line and assist in helping you get subscribers to open the email.

3. Write Less Copy
Because your message will be read on mobile devices by one-quarter to one-third of your recipients by the end of 2011, you’ll need to trim back the amount of content in your email. Use the bare minimum needed to get across your offer or information. This may mean using small amounts of copy and linking to your site more often, or simply reducing the amount of textual content in your campaigns.

4. Revise Your Creative
Mobile devices will either scale down your email creative (like on iPhone and iPad) or force users to scroll to see it at natural size (Android devices).  Because of the vast amount of iPhone/iPad owners using their devices for email, you’ll need to redesign your email with scaling in mind. Our next blog post will cover this topic in detail.

5. Tweak Your Code
Mobile display scaling can create some issues, as font sizes and other visual relationships can appear either too small or unreadable when scaled down. In order to manage this, there are several coding techniques that will help you retain readable font sizes and ensure your messages take up the full width of the mobile display. We’ll also cover these coding best practices in a future post and provide code examples for you to implement in your campaigns.

After several years of slow growth, it seems email subscribers are rapidly moving towards using their mobile devices to manage their email. With such rapid growth in this area, all email marketers need to adopt mobile marketing best practices in the very near future. The small screen is here to stay, so get ready now!

If you’re interested in improving your campaigns to be mobile-ready, contact Email Transmit for reduced rates on mobile email preparation services.

Tags: copywriting, creative, des, design, email design, email marketing, Mobile, mobile email, pre-header, programming, subject line