Society is always on the go and using their mobile devices, whether it is to buy products they need urgently or to open important emails when they arrive. Your current and potential students and parents form part of this audience that is using their mobile devices for email, and as a school, you need to be prepared and ready to meet this expectation.
When you are creating an email communication strategy you need to focus on making the emails mobile-friendly. This will make it easier for your audience to open the emails on their mobile devices, and will lead to better click-through-rates and fewer bounces. If you are not sure where to start, below we give some tips on how to create mobile-friendly emails.
Adopt Vertical Design
Designing your emails vertically will help immensely in making emails mobile-friendly. You need to think about what device the email will be viewed on, and a mobile device screen width is usually between two and six inches wide, for most modern smartphones.
This means that you need to get your message across in less space than on a desktop computer, which is where a vertical email design can come in handy. A vertical design has a piece of new content on each “rung” of the ladder it is designed as. This vertical approach mimics the way we interact with our phones, making it easier for your audience to read the emails and interact with them.
Choose Short Subject Lines
Mobile devices have smaller screens, which means that they cannot show a very long subject line in emails. To make mobile-friendly emails, you need to create short, attention-grabbing subject lines that will be shown in the inbox.
Your email subject line is like a news headline, and should be short, punchy, and 30 characters or less so that it fits within the phone’s smaller width. If you need a longer subject line, try to place two or four of the most important words at the beginning of the sentence so that they are not cut off and missed by readers.
Love Larger Font Sizes
Reading a small font on the screen of a mobile device can be extremely difficult even for those with the best eye-sight. For mobile-friendly emails, you should choose larger fonts so that everyone is able to read them, and you should also look into using fonts that can easily be read by those with dyslexia and other problems.
A font size of 13 or 14 pixels is much easier to read on a smaller screen, but be sure that the font style is suitable for this size, as some may look too large on a small screen.
Implement Smaller Images
While images in an email can be highly effective, when it comes to being mobile-friendly emails, you will need to use smaller images so that they can load easily on a movie device. This is because some readers might only have older 3G connections or access to public WiFi, making it difficult for them to load images.
You should also only use one to two images per email, and be sure to add in alt-text so that if the image does not load, there is still context for what would have been displayed.
Use Clear CTAs (Calls-To-Action)
A call-to-action is what guides a user to take action, whether it is to sign up for a newsletter or start the application process on your school website. When you are creating mobile-friendly emails, you need to keep these CTAs clear and easy-to-spot, which means placing it near the top of your email.
Make these large enough to see and for fingers to easily press, as some people might not be as nimble on their phones as others. The wording of the CTA should be short and to-the-point.
Embrace Mobile-Friendly Emails
This might sound like a long and confusing list, but if you put it all together and make sure to implement it every time, soon each email that your school sends out will be geared towards mobile friendliness with little to no effort. Adopt vertical designs for easier reading, be sure to use shorter subject lines and calls-to-action, and use larger fonts.
If you need help with creating emails and newsletters for your students and parents, speak to the Edumedia team to find out how we can help you.
