A B2B mobile marketing strategy is a must for any company that wants to interact with its target audience. It’s not just consumers looking at their phones and tablets more so than their laptops and desktops. Company decision-makers already use mobile devices to help them work from anywhere, conducting research, interacting with B2B brands, and making purchases.
As part of this B2B mobile marketing strategy, emails are an integral way to reach out to prospects with information they need to make purchase decisions. However, like the other components found in this mobile plan, there are differences in terms of the optimum mobile email experience. Here’s what a mobile-optimized email should look like.
Be Concise with Everything
An optimized email is easy on the eyes. That means you will have to take a streamlined approach to both the written and visual content. Keeping it simple will help everything from load time to the short attention span of your recipient.
That means a clean, stripped-down design with just one or two key points. With minimal text, you also won’t have to resort to using a tiny font size that no one can read just to fit in everything you need to say. Instead, use at least 14pt for mobile email body text and 20pt for headlines.
You don’t want to make your recipient scroll or move around the screen to find what they need in your email. If you do, they are sure to abandon your email.
Pay Attention to Images in Mobile Emails
Since visuals are such a beloved part of any marketing interaction, your images have to be perfect. Send a mobile email with a blurry picture, and you can basically conclude you’ve lost engagement with whoever received it.
You might think that responsive design typically found in drag-and-drop email templates is the cure-all for image issues for mobile devices. But, it’s not that easy. This is because emails don’t always use the same format, especially if what you are sending is actually a transactional-style message or an email newsletter both of which have multi-column layouts.
Also, you need to optimize your email images for mobile devices in a responsive manner and follow best practice approaches to using images in these mobile emails. For example, avoid using images that are thumbnail size, such as those with a width of 180px. These images will then stretch to twice their size when viewed on an iPhone and look terrible.
You also have to plan your mobile email images for mobile devices that use high-definition displays like the iPhone’s Retina. This display stretches an image even more than other mobile device displays. That means a blurry, pixelated image, which no one wants to look at.
In these cases, you can use the iPhone screen as a point of reference, using images that are twice as large as the screen’s width. This equates to images with an approximate width of 750px.
Take Other Image Actions
However, it’s not just about sizing the images correctly. That’s because you also have to think about load time when your recipient opens their mobile email. This is when you need to think about how to compress your image files.
To do this, you can use your photo editing software that typically include this feature. Or, you can try a photo compression service that figures out the optimum compression to do for each image you upload to it.
Make Link Size and CTA Buttons Bigger Than You Think
Although you may assume that the smaller screen found on a mobile device means that everything should shrink, that’s not the case with your link size and call-to-action (CTA) buttons. These are two aspects of the mobile email where you want the recipient to do something that directly impacts your leads and conversions.
Therefore, these need to be easy to read, which means make them big enough to read clearly so they know where to click on a text link. For a CTA button, the recommended size is to be taller and wider than 57 x 57 pixels.
Always Preview and Test Before Sending
The best approach is to test your mobile emails before you send them by viewing them on different mobile device screens. You can get others on your marketing team to also look at the mobile email for their feedback. Some email editor software lets you see a preview, but most often you can send the email to others in the company before publishing it to your entire database. After all, you only get one chance to make an impression with that mobile email campaign.
Find out more about responsive design and adapting emails to the micro-screens of mobile with this “Mobile Email Guide.”
Go to the guide.