Mobile Marketing: How to Effectively Reach Consumers On-The-Go

Today’s consumers are increasingly living “on-the-go” lifestyles, and continuous advancements in technology make this easier and more convenient each day. In fact, a recent study revealed that over 36 percent of emails are opened on a mobile device. As this number continues to climb, it is now more important than ever for retailers to improve their mobile marketing services to ensure that they are reaching customers at the right time and through the right venue.

Where Marketers Struggle

The most common failure among brands’ current mobile strategy is the use of complex mobile platforms that make it difficult for users to engage in messages and react to calls to action. Nearly half of all consumers say that emails on mobile devices are difficult to read. Yet, 76 percent of brands offer only a basic mobile strategy or do not offer one at all.

Mobile marketing material becomes too complex and difficult for consumers to read when excessive scrolling is required or when layouts are incompatible with mobile devices. Mobile users are less likely to read and engage with email content if they are required to excessively scroll through emails to find important information or action items. Similarly, if consumers are required to adjust their screen to read content or view images, they are less likely to engage. Still, most mobile layouts are incompatible with smaller screen sizes.

Improvements to be Made

To ensure that consumers interact with brand content on mobile devices, brands need to shift toward layouts that are easier to read and engage with. Mobile designs should be both responsive and scalable. They need to be screen-proportional, visually appealing and compatible with the device a customer is using. Most importantly, email content should be easy to read when scaled down to the smaller size on mobile devices.

Brands can create both responsive and scalable platforms by implementing compatible design features such as larger logos, navigation buttons and text. Larger logos that link back to websites draws a users’ attention and increases the likelihood that the user will click through to the company website. Similarly, larger navigation or interaction buttons that are big enough for a 44-pixel-sized fingertip to click make it easier for a user to react to call to action items.

Marketers should also ensure that the most compelling information is featured as close to the top as possible.  Mobile users have short attention spans; reducing the amount of scrolling increases the likelihood that a user will comprehend a brands’ message.  The information should be simple and the text should be at least size 14, so users are not required to zoom or adapt their screen size and can see the most important information at a glance.
Less important information or supporting details are best saved for the end of an email, where they won’t divert a user’s attention.

As today’s consumers continue to increase their mobile email usage, it is crucial that brands effectively reach customers through this venue.  Mobile users tend to shy away from content that is too difficult to read, that requires excessive scrolling or does not have a simple call to action.  By implementing responsive and scalable design features, brands have the ability to significantly increase engagement and interaction among mobile users.

Contributed by Matt Caldwell, who has been working with email design since 1999. He is the founder of Yesmail’s award-winning creative services group, made up of big name clients like Kodak, Coca-Cola and HP.