The future of email marketing is here, and it's in your customers' hands. 

Email marketing on mobile phones has been hovering like either fate or opportunity, depending on how you view it. Maybe you've embraced it already, because your customers are a mobile bunch. Or, maybe you think it's something you'll think about tomorrow, like Scarlett O'Hara.

Just a few years ago, the mobile Web was something that only the folks out on the bleeding edge of technology had to deal with. The iPhone, introduced in 2007, and other breeds of smart phones, have now put the Web squarely in millions of people's hands.

According to the Pew Internet Project, "58% of adult Americans have used a cell phone or personal digital assistant to do at least one of ten mobile non-voice data activities, such as texting, emailing, taking a picture, looking for maps or directions, or recording video."

Mobile's biggest challenge will be in forcing you to cross the final frontier in your email-marketing program to make it completely customer-centric. We talk a lot about customer-centricity, of designing campaigns and messages to make them as close as possible to what the customers want to receive, when, in which format and on what platform. Maybe you read all that and thought, "Yeah, yeah, sounds good ... but I'm still going to send all my email in HTML because it lets me run a big pretty product picture."

It's time to face the music.

Are Your Customers Going Mobile?

First, find out, if you can, how many of your regular readers read your email on their cell phones or portable devices.

Create a text version of your HTML message and place it on a page at your Web site. Then, put a link to this version at the top of an email message, next to the link to your Web version. Count the number of clicks the link draws in the first three or four times you send it out. If fewer than 2% of your subscribers click on it, you don't need to drop everything just yet.

If it's more than 10%, however, it's time to roll up your sleeves.

What Makes Mobile Different?

1. The platform
Obviously, the platform is different. Instead of a screen that measures 13 to 21 inches on the diagonal, you have maybe 2 to 4 inches. And you thought the preview pane was restrictive?

2. Content rendering
Mobile devices vary wildly in how they render content. Even the recent news that BlackBerry software will be updated to show HTML content won't mean an immediate revolution. Text usually renders well on most devices, but you'll want to rethink even your text messages to optimize them for the smaller screen.

3. Uses
Your readers might not be living their lives through their mobiles just yet, but they most likely use their phones to triage their inboxes when they're away from their keyboards.

"Triage" here means they are reading their email on their cell phones while they're waiting for a flight, taking the commuter train to work or going home, sitting at a child's soccer game, or stuck in traffic. They scan through the inbox quickly, seeing which emails to open right away, which to ditch and which to save for later use at home or in the office.

Optimize Messages for Mobile Readers

The good news is that if you optimized your HTML messages to compensate for blocked images and the preview pane, both of which are default settings for most desktop and Web email clients, your messages will show up better on most mobile platforms.

However, you should take a couple of extra steps to make messages even more mobile-friendly:

1. Reformat text

You should always offer a text option as an alternative to HTML for all readers. You can send this version to your mobile readers, but you might also have to reformat it to make it show up better on the smaller screen.

Most text messages have 60 to 80 characters per line. Mobile platforms will show 20 to 40 characters in 12 to 15 lines per screen, depending on screen width and type style.

Desktop-friendly line lengths can create long paragraphs in the mobile reader. If you use typographic devices as copy separators that also run 60 characters, for example, you'll give up four to five lines on the screen for something that adds no value.

2. Rethink tracking URLs

Same goes for URLs. Tracking URLs can also consume four to five lines per screen. If you can, use a simpler URL even if it means sacrificing some tracking ability. These long URLs can result from automatically reformatting HTML copy into text, so your text version may need some hand-tweaking in order to render better on all platforms.

3. Be brief.

Message size must come down whether you send in text or HTML. Messages over a certain size -- even as small as 12KB -- risk being cut off halfway through. In many clients, your reader can opt to click a button that will call up the rest of the message, but do you want to throw up that obstacle?

Personally, I hate it when I open a message and find "message truncated" right at the top. I need more to make me want to click the button that will deliver the rest of the message.

Another message I get that frustrates me to no end is "This message contains a rich-text HTML portion. Consult your mail client's documentation for information on how to view it." Uh, I don't think so. Delete! That means it won't be there when I get to my desk.

Also, rethink the content itself. Long sentences in long paragraphs force more and more scrolling. This also can be a barrier to conversion or another source of frustration for readers.

4. Validate your Web site, too.

Is your Web site mobile-friendly too? Probably not, if you haven't had it redesigned specifically for mobile applications. If you have to send readers to your Web site to get the most value from your email marketing, better make sure it will also render on their devices. You can check it easily by using a new validator developed by the World Wide Web Consortium: http://validator.w3.org/mobile/.

Final Thoughts On Mobile-Friendly Emails

• Include a mobile option on your subscription or registration page. Track how many users check this option.
• Add a mobile reference to your online-version link in your message copy.
• "Above the fold" becomes even more crucial on the mobile screen. If you must keep boilerplate elements such as an admin center at the bottom, link to it near the top so that readers will know they need to click to download it.
• Keep your message short, and give readers a reason to save it for later to view in their desktop clients.
• Test before sending. You should be doing this anyway, but mobile adds another platform to the mix. Don't assume that because it looks good on your BlackBerry or iPhone, it will show up that way on all Web-enabled phones. Make sure it looks good on the cruddiest phone in the office, too.

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