Mobile Email Design DOs and DON’Ts
Style Campaign has always been one of my favorite email marketing blogs, primarily because they seem to focus on niche topics such as video, animated gifs and now, mobile.
Mobile is on top of every marketer’s minds who have any involvement in email. It’s an exciting time for us in the industry. In a relatively short time, the entire email landscape is going to be effect by mobile’s influence. It’s not a question of “if”, but more a question of “when” it will take over the majority of email client market share.
So with that it mind, it is becoming increasingly clear that email designs must be able to conform to mobile devices. This article at Style Campaign goes into much detail about the do’s and don’ts regarding email design. It’s a fantastic read for anyone interested in mobile-centric revamping your newsletter.
Key takeaways:
The peak of mobile email use is around 7AM, when everyone is waking up. This means people’s vision is bleary and their overall effectiveness of handling their phones properly is decreased. Because of this, we must design our emails to make it easy for the beleaguered, pre-caffeinated masses.
44x44 is the perfect dimension for a fingertip to touch a link, according to Apple. With this in mind, there shouldn’t be any competing links within that block. Convenience for one-handed users is key.
Big buttons make for a better mobile user experience than tiny ones.
Most people handle their phones with their right hands. Keep general ergonomics in mind when and where you place specific icons and links.
Text under 12px will scale up, which in turn can break your design. Auto-scaling can be prevented by adding the style ”-webkit-text-size-adjust:none”
While it is a best practice for your email’s navigation to resemble the site’s navigation, that’s not necessarily the case for mobile email.
So with the increase of mobile use, will we see all best practices slowly change and evolve? Will we see mobile’s influence effect all email designs from this point on? Time will tell.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 06, 2011