21.Jul.2010 Mobile Marketing: Make your emails mobile friendly

This is the first of the series on mobile marketing from guest blogger Scott Middleton:

If you’re thinking “mobile marketing isn’t relevant to my business” then you are dead wrong.

If you’re dealing with anyone that might potentially check their email from their phone then mobile marketing is important to you.

Today, almost everyone deals with clients that use BlackBerrys, iPhones or any other type of mobile that lets them easily access their email. Some people have been booking a third seat at a restaurant for their partners BlackBerry.

You must make sure these people can read your email on their phone.

Put yourself in the mind of someone reading your email from their phone. They’re either sitting on public transport, rushing between meetings or out and about. They need to be able to quickly digest whatever it is you send them.

Here are 5 tips to make sure the emails you send are mobile friendly.

1. Keep your emails brief and clear. This should go without saying but becomes even more important if someone is reading your email from their mobile.

2. Resize your images to be no more than 300 pixels wide. This is slightly smaller than the width of the iPhone. Doing this means the reader doesn’t need to zoom in or out.

3. Check your signature shows up nicely on a mobile. Send an email to yourself, friends or colleagues and see how it looks. You may want to do a bit of tweaking.

4. Keep paragraphs short. On your laptop or computer a paragraph can be many sentences long. On the mobile a 3 or 4 sentence paragraph can mean A LOT of scrolling. By breaking your sentences up you make your email easier to skim and thus easier for a mobile reader to digest.

5. Test it out yourself. Send a few emails you would usually send or are about to send to yourself instead of the outside world. Try and read that email from your mobile while putting yourself in your reader’s mind (they might be waiting for a bus that is just about to pull up). Would you be able to quickly understand the emails contents?

Have I missed any tips on making your emails more mobile-friendly? Please let us know in the comments. You don’t have to sign up or join anything to comment, just leave your comment below and it will appear on the post straight away.

Scott is the founder of infome. infome provides ready-to-go mobile offers, mobile marketing, mobile loyalty and mobile retail solutions. Scott has 8 years experience developing mobile/web solutions and 3 years commercialising them. Scott blogs about mobile at scottmiddleton.wordpress.com.