Retailers Fail to Offer the Best Mobile Experience

By Matt Caldwell

Nearly half of all email opens now occur on a mobile device. This growing consumer tendency to view email on mobile devices has important implications for retailers that market via the channel.

In their branded emails, retailers need to embed calls to action that are simple to follow, using responsive design that increases engagement and allows consumers to easily interact with email content.

Areas Where Retailers’ Mobile Strategies Fail
An overwhelming 76 percent of brands only offer a basic mobile strategy or don't have one at all, hindering consumers from engaging with email content and making mobile transactions. Nearly half of consumers say mobile emails are difficult to read for these reasons:

Excessive scrolling: When users have to excessively scroll through emails to get to the call-to-action buttons, they're less likely to click through and engage with the content.
Incompatible mobile layouts: Nearly 30 percent of email users are frustrated by email layouts that don't adjust to their mobile screen. When mobile layouts are incompatible with a smaller screen size, brands will struggle to get users to even look at their email messages.

Tips for Creating a Better Mobile Experience
Retailers should use a hybrid layout with both responsive and scalable design to ensure consumers can interact with their email content. Responsive design adapts emails to the device subscribers are using, creating screen-proportional layouts that are visually appealing. Scalable design ensures that emails are still readable when reduced to half their size on a mobile device.

Retailers can use both tactics to improve their email strategy with these tips:

Larger logo: When redesigning email layouts for mobile use, brands should make their logo larger than in the desktop version. Having a larger logo that links back to the website increases the likelihood that email users will click on the logo, leading to more website traffic and engagement with content.
Larger navigation: Mobile layouts should have simplified navigation so users can easily maneuver through the email. Brands should strip down the category menu from several categories to only two or three. Removing unnecessary navigation links while making existing navigation buttons larger will lead to higher clickthrough rates.
More featured content: Your emails should lead with the most compelling content to grab subscribers’ attention right away. When designing mobile layouts, hide extra content that diverts users from the main content, such as the sidebar. Removing these elements allows for increased focus on featured content.
Larger text: Marketers should ensure that text and calls to actions are large enough for consumers to read on a mobile screen. Text should be at least size 14 and call-to-action buttons should be big enough for a 44-pixel-sized fingertip to click with ease. Making the text and call-to-action buttons larger will enable consumers to instantly engage with content.

As the popularity of mobile email platforms continues to rise, retailers should consider overhauling their mobile strategies to better accommodate users who access their email on mobile devices. Creating more engaging mobile layouts encourages subscribers to interact with email content, leading to increased mobile traffic and customer satisfaction.

Matt Caldwell is the vice president of creative and agency services for Yesmail Interactive, a provider of enterprise email marketing software.