The Whitelist

5 tips for designing emails for mobile marketing.

We hear lots of cries for designing our emails for mobile devices, but how many of us really know what that means? Do we have the email rendering tool that will help us modify our email templates for smart phones and PDAs?

Thank goodness Neil Berman–in a recent EmailInsider article–just gave us a short, concise list that makes it easier to design for email rendering on mobile devices. I call quick, to-the-point advice like this a useful email rendering tool!

Neil’s 5 email rendering tips are so common sense, you should be able to implement them right away:

1. Include your actual street address, phone number and email address.
2. Use both images and text, and put the text behind the images.
3. Keep your most important information “above the fold.”
4. Keep navigation on the top left.
5. Keep the bulk of your calls to actions so they can be seen by all platforms.

Go to Neil’s email rendering article for his actual list. (I both shortened and modified it rather than plagiarize.) And thank you, Neil, for making this so straightforward! This ain’t no fancy email rendering tool, only common sense advice every email marketer should follow…and will follow now that you know about it, right?

Sometimes your eye is your best email rendering tool.

Can we ever say enough about the importance of the Preview Pane…and testing? Not yet! There are too many examples of email best practices being ignored, and ineffective Preview Panes are the result.

The biggest issue, seems to me, or should I say the most flagrant disregard of email best practices, is ignoring the significance of image blocking, especially on the Preview Pane. Jeanne Jennings gives us yet another example, comparing one version with the images on versus one version with the images blocked. Among the glitches that resulted:

 • The newsletter name disappeared.
• The headline disappeared.
• The navigation bar disappeared.
• The photo disappeared.

As she points out, what you’re left with is a Preview Pane that does nothing to get the recipient to open and engage with the email. What a waste of effort that is, to adhere to all the email best practices that get you into the inbox, then not take the next step to get that email opened and acted upon.

Note: I wasn’t surprised by this Preview Pane, because I pay a lot of attention to who is following best practices for email marketing (and who isn’t) in my own inbox. But there was one element that surprised me: the navigation bar. In the USA Today email, the navigation bar must have been an image too, because it doesn’t show up in the images blocked version. That struck me as especially odd, for some reason…

Take a quick look at Jeanne’s comparison and then go do a quick review of your own Preview Pane. Are you designing for blocked image? Or ignoring some of these best practices for email marketing?

And remember: Sometimes your best email rendering tool is your eyes! See what it looks like yourself, with images blocked!

Twice in the last month I’ve received emails from entrepreneurial friends, one starting an online publication, the other starting an online store.

In both cases, the emails showed up in my inbox as almost completely blank. I had a tiny red x in the middle, and some standard footer information at the bottom.

Every single bit of information, every graphic, every design element, every word and call to action was invisible to me. All of it. The only reason I right-clicked on the red x to download the images was because I knew these guys and I wanted to see what they were up to.
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Here’s a question for you email marketers: Where can you get an email rendering tool that also helps you with email deliverability best practices and email marketing best practices, all in one place? The answer is Pivotal Veracity. Pivotal Veracity offers innovative, cutting-edge tools for improving your:

• Email deliverability
• Online sending reputation
• Email rendering
• Email engagement
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Thank you, thank you, to MarketingSherpa for calling to attention—once again—the issue of images being blocked in emails. Their article was prompted by an email that showed up in their inbox with only little red x’s. Surprised to get such an email, they reiterate how important it is to design for image blocking, something you’d think would be an email marketing best practice for all by now.
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