The power of email as a marketing medium is it can reach any recipient with an internet connection at any time on any electronic communication device. This is why it’s essential for digital marketers to ensure their email designs are user-friendly across various gadgets and screen sizes. In this blog post, we demonstrate what these optimised templates are, highlight why you should use them, and explain how you can create them.
What are Responsive Email Templates?
Think of responsive email templates as reusable email layouts that incorporate the latest mobile-friendly email design principles and features. For example, they combine responsive coding techniques with optimised design styling, fonts, image settings, and layouts.
Here are three reasons you should consider using responsive email templates in your promotional email campaigns.
1. Improved User Experience
Your emails will display correctly in most inboxes no matter what device your recipients use. Since cell phones are increasingly used to read emails, you will benefit from providing an excellent user experience on mobile. Readers who enjoy interacting with your emails are more likely to convert, as the journey is smooth and directs naturally towards your calls to action.
2. Increased Engagement
The content of your emails helps build trust with your recipients, which increases open and engagement rates; factors that have a direct impact on deliverability. By ensuring your emails provide a user-friendly experience across devices, your customers are much more likely to want to engage with your content.
3. Elevate Your Digital Brand
Your online brand is a valuable asset, and maintaining a professional online brand image is essential for success. Strong visual design and user experience play pivotal roles in shaping customer perceptions.
By prioritising responsive designs and ensuring a seamless experience across all touchpoints, you not only establish credibility but also foster loyalty among your audience. This, in turn, enhances brand recognition and brand equity and reinforces trust.
Features That Make Templates Responsive
Almost every aspect of an email can be adjusted to make it more mobile friendly, here are seven features of a responsive email template that you should consider.
- Responsive Design: At the heart of mobile-friendly template design is media queries, as this CSS feature allows you to use layouts and other specifications based on the screen sizes you want to customise your emails for.
- Single-Column Layout: Keeping all your content in one column economises space for smaller mobile screens and ensures your fonts are legible without the need to zoom in.
- Responsive Images: Images in responsive emails are scaled in proportion to the screen they appear on, for example to occupy 50% of the screen and not according to a fixed pixel width.
- Touch-Friendly Buttons: Most cell phones and tablets are touchscreen devices these days, and you need to ensure users can easily interact with your buttons. One way of doing this is by using a minimum button size of 44×44 pixels.
- Font Size and Spacing: Generally, font sizes for mobile responsive emails are larger than for desktops to account for legibility on smaller screens. A larger font size also means wider line spaces to accommodate bigger characters.
- Mobile-Friendly Fonts: Not all fonts work equally well on mobile, and brands who use email marketing need reader-friendly fonts for effective digital communication. Cursive and hand-written fonts can reduce legibility on small screens.
- Bare Essentials: Optimised emails tend to be cleaner, leaner, and easier to navigate when viewed on mobile. Prioritise essential content and keep the design simple to promote maximum engagement.
If you’re not tech savvy or if you’re short on time, Everlytic can help! Our Digital Services Team can help you build, send, and track your email campaigns. They’ll also equip you with a selection of or design custom ones just for you.
A Quick Note on Testing Your Templates
To avoid disappointment on your campaign launch day, test your templates extensively on popular Android and iOS devices with common screen sizes. You can also test your messaging on well-known email service providers, like Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail to ensure your email renders correctly.
Leading digital communication platforms, like Everlytic, feature integrated testing tools, which are updated regularly to ensure you get the most up-to-date view of how your responsive emails will display in your recipients’ inboxes. This can help you avoid feeling uncertain about how your email looks or asking your colleagues and friends to help you test emails on their mobile devices.
