Now is the time for Responsive Email Design

No doubt you’ve heard lots of buzz about responsive design lately – but have you gotten on board?

If not, now is the time.

If you’re not familiar with responsive design, here’s a quick summary: It’s a design technique that allows you to create an email so that your essential content – that is, everything people need to see to understand and act on your message, and nothing they don’t – will show up beautifully on any mobile device, desktop or laptop. In this mobile age, when nearly half of all emails are being opened on mobile devices, there are many benefits to incorporating responsive design into your emails:

1. It keeps navigation intuitive for the user

For example, you can take elements from a standard two-column design and stack them on top of each other to enable vertical rather than horizontal scrolling. This is key, because it’s pretty safe to say that no one wants to do any horizontal scrolling on a smartphone.

2. It can help drive engagement and conversion

Did you know that email opens on mobile device have increased by 330% in the last two years? And that desktop email engagement has dropped by 44% over the same period? So, if you are not optimizing your emails for mobile devices, you can be pretty sure that around half of your subscribers are not seeing them the way they were meant to look.

Contrary to what many marketers think, people are not skimming emails on their mobile devices and bookmarking them to read later. In fact, 97% of all email interactions happen via whichever device was first used to open it. And if your subscribers open your message on a mobile device, and it’s not optimized for mobile, 63% of them will delete it right away. There are no second chances. If your message doesn’t render properly when it’s first opened, you’ve lost your shot. Needless to say, ignoring the need for mobile email optimization can be crippling to your campaigns.

3. It’ll help you get ahead of the competition

Mobile email engagement is here to stay, but many marketers have been slow to respond. In fact, according to a recent report, only 2 in 10 marketers say they plan to start optimizing their emails for mobile within the next year.

Don’t wait until everyone else has jumped on the bandwagon. Mobile isn’t going anywhere, and the sooner you begin incorporating responsive design into your emails, the sooner you’ll start standing out from the competition. You’ll be giving your subscribers a much a better user experience, thereby increasing the chances for better results in the form of increased engagement, response and revenue.

What do you think? Have you started using responsive design in your emails? How’s it working for you? Let us know below!