Responsive eCommerce Email Marketing Best Practices
description
Transcript of Responsive eCommerce Email Marketing Best Practices
5 Good Things to Know About Responsive Email Marketing
Trying to get your responsive email template underway isn’t always an easy task. There are several things to consider. The way you markup your template, and the CSS properties used, can significantly alter your email display across multiple clients.
I’ve been building responsive websites for years but recently
started exploring responsive email design, and began to search for
some simple techniques that’ll get any template designer started in
the right direction.
1. Tables inside Tables inside Table Rows inside One Big Table! Ok, that’s not exactly how it goes.. but you catch my drift
The need to use div tags in email (even in 2014) is limited. A study
on campaignmonitor.com analyzed the use of div markup versus
tablebased markup, and tested the results across multiple email
clients. The results were messy.. many email clients didn’t render
the CSS properties needed for the appropriate display, including
the latest version of Outlook.
While the idea of using div tags in email markup is highly frowned
upon, there is often a misconception associated with it. Div tags
can be useful in some situations, such as the replacement of br
and p tags, and can sometimes be used to save time on inline
styling.
An example of responsive email markup:
The html text in the picture below would nest (in a table) in between
the td tag that contains the background image.
2. Say Goodbye to External Style Sheets In responsive email design, there is no need or use for external
stylesheets
All styles and media queries should take place in the head of your
html document.
3. Mobile First, Always
Start with the smallest device resolution If you’ve ever messed around with responsive design before, you
know that when a small device zooms out to catch up with a wide
layout, the text is impossible to read. We combat this by adding a
media query.
In responsive design, we know that the smallest device screen to
consider is the iPhone in portrait mode.
The width of an iPhone in portrait mode is 320px wide. So we’ll use
this as our starting point and account for all device widths that are
greater than 320px but less than 480px.
4. Declaring Classes Responsive design means that you’re dealing with tables, and
dealing with tables can sometimes be confusing for beginning
developers (as weird as it sounds).
The way to manage your classes within your media queries, is to
set the class name to the html element associated with it. For
example, here we have multiple tables within our 480px media
query. Notice how some tables need to span the entire 100% of
the device, and others less.
5. Size Matters
A good calltoaction can be the difference between click throughs and abandonment. In addition, proper fontsizes and button sizes need to be
considered..
For mobile design, an absolute minimum fontsize of 16px is
recommended.
Apple suggests a fontsize of 17px – 22px, and Google suggests
18px – 22px, with the calltoaction being at least 46px in height.
The best way to ensure that your calltoaction is sufficient, is to
put it through the squint test.
If you or someone else can still tell what the calltoaction is when
you’re squinting, you’ve passed the test.
I’ve been doing this for about a year, anyone that wants to share
their expertise id love to hear about your responsive email
success. –
Danny is a project manager at eCommerce Cosmos. He's on the cutting edge of responsive email design, behavioral email marketing, and website development