Whether you are asking customers for feedback or announcing a new promotion, you put some effort into designing and delivering an email or campaign with a specific message. Chances are you designed and wrote your email campaign on a desktop or laptop. However, did you make sure that your emails were optimized for your mobile-friendly readers? If not, you’re missing the opportunity to connect with a majority of your subscribers with mobile-friendly email campaigns.
According to the Litmus Email Analytics Report (March 2016), 55% of emails are now opened on mobile devices, 19% on desktops, and 26% on webmail.
Source: Litmus
The Kahuna “Mobile Marketing Index” for Q1 2016 has data showing 86% of emails were opened on a mobile device.
The BlueHornet “Customer Views of Email Marketing 2015” report stated 67.2% of consumers use a smartphone to check their email, 42.3% use a tablet, and 93.3% use a desktop environment.
Source: EmailMonday.com
At the I/O Developers Conference in May 2015, Google stated that 75% of their 900 million Gmail users access their accounts on a mobile device.
B2C emails get 57.4% more opens on mobile than B2B email (42.78% mobile opens vs. 27.18% mobile opens), according to the DDMA “Nationale Email Benchmark 2015” report.
Knowing that each time you send an email, a majority of your readers will be opening them on a mobile device changes need to be made. You’ve got a mobile responsive website (I know you do), so now you need to create attention-grabbing emails that look good on smaller screens and function smoothly in a mobile setting.
Simple, uncluttered email designs ensure that taps and slides done with a finger and not a mouse get your reader where you want them to go. Instead of stuffing every image and link you think is relevant, have a clear goal for each email and pick your most important offers and links. Space any clickable images, calls to action, or links far apart enough to single out with a finger tap.
A single column will help you keep your design simple and compatible with mobile environments. It’s a straightforward design that works with all email clients and keeps the most important information front and center.
Tablets range in size and smartphones have gotten bigger in the last few years but screen real estate is still limited. Most devices can now display 35 to 40 characters of an email subject line. Mobile-friendly email subject lines have powerful subject lines that fit that space, or at least fit the most important information at the beginning.
Your email campaigns should have a goal. Your call-to-action in each email should tell the reader what to do next, getting you closer to that goal. It should be big and bold on mobile screens, but avoid using an image as your call-to-action. Some email clients won’t show images from unverified senders and users can select to not display images on their mobile devices.
Most leading email marketing software have a way for you to design and test your mobile-friendly email. Litmus has an “Instant Email Previews” feature that lets you see screenshots of your emails across 50 apps and devices to ensure your email design is compatible with all mobile and desktop environments. MailChimp’s “Inbox Preview” feature (for paid users) is another example of a great tool for testing how your email will look on mobile devices in more than 40 different mobile clients.
If your email provider doesn’t have a mobile testing feature, you’ll just have to go old school. Build an email, send it to yourself and check it on the smartphones and tablets at your disposal (friends and family), fix what doesn’t look right, and then use it as a template.
At the beginning of the millennium, Microsoft Outlook ruled the email universe and the average desktop monitor was 1024 pixels and to ensure your emails showed properly in these constraints marketers used a 600 pixels wide rule. With responsive designs and higher resolutions, you still need to resist the urge to get too fancy or go bigger. At widths wider than 640 pixels Gmail doesn’t show the background colors that appear in the margins. Additionally, many email clients still use some of that larger screen for menus, navigation, and ads.
No one is going to squint to read your email. They can pinch and slide to make it larger and move it around but why would they? Use 14- or 15-pixel font sizes to make your mobile-friendly email more readable on smaller screens.
Reduce load times and bandwidth by using smaller images. Unless you know how some responsive-coding, the easiest thing to do is to shrink your image under 480 pixels and then compress for faster page loading.
Have you ever scrolled from side to side, or pinched and spread on a marketing email to make sure you read every word and saw every image? Me either! Poor email user experience leads to spam folders and unsubscribe clicks. As more and more of your readers rely on their mobile devices for everything mobile-friendly email is a requirement.
Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.
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Growing your business is made easier when you can increase the number of visitors to your website and publishing customer engaging content is proven to drive traffic. Engaging content is one of the pillars of a solid SEO strategy. Creating the content that customers want to see and interact with can be the most time-consuming of all your SEO activities, but I’m here to help you with these 13 free tools to create more engaging content.
When I say “engaging content,” it means content that is useful to your customers, solves their problems and is easy to consume. A thousand-word blog post can seem like a big time commitment to your customers and prospects but becomes more engaging content in the form of an infographic or six-minute podcast or video. Here are the free tools that will get you to the next level with your content, improve your SEO, and let you connect with more customers.
“Communicate with colleagues and clients in an unexpected and refreshing way by using PowToon’s Ready-Made Templates for plenty of business situations. It’s as easy as making a PowerPoint presentation and as impactful as a viral video.” – PowToon
“Magisto automatically turns your everyday videos and photos into beautifully edited movies, perfect for sharing. It’s free, quick, and easy as pie! Magisto selects the best parts of your videos and photos, adds your chosen music, themes,
and effects, and splices them into beautiful little movies.” – Magisto
“WeVideo is a powerful and easy-to-use cloud-based collaborative video editor. Advanced features with a simple interface. You don’t need to be a professional to create great videos. You control the look of your video, including transitions, fast/slow motion, green screen, and more!” – WeVideo
“Show what you know through a presentation, infographic, document or videos. Visual formats help you stand out and resonate more with your readers. When you upload to SlideShare, you reach an audience that’s interested in your content – over 80% of SlideShare’s 70 million visitors come through targeted search” – SlidesShare
“Create interactive content in a snap! Generate and profile higher quality leads. Boost your content with interactive tools and engage users. Drive traffic to your website. Use customer feedback and unique insight. Create smart quizzes, polls, and surveys in a minute – intuitive and effortless panel with unbelievable possibilities. Easily embed and share your interactive content with any network– no coding skills and additional features required.” – 4Screens
“Audacity can record live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from other media. With some sound cards, and on any recent version of Windows, Audacity can also capture streaming audio. Import sound files, edit them, and combine them with other files or new recordings. Export your recordings in many different file formats, including multiple files at once. Easy editing with Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete.” – Audacity
“Podbean.com is an easy and powerful way to start podcasting. Everything You Need to Create, Manage & Promote Your Podcast! Easy uploading and publishing tools, stunning templates, custom domains, social & promotional tools, embeddable podcast player, monetization tools and more.” (Free to start and then $3 a month) – PodBean
“Take your visual communication to the next level, without hiring a professional designer. Turn heads and captivate viewers with beautiful visuals. Watch your site SEO and blog traffic soar with the use of infographics. Increase brand awareness through easy-to-digest graphics.” – Piktochart
“Design with millions of stock photographs, vectors, and illustrations. You can even upload your own. Photo filters to edit your photos or get advanced with photo editing tools. Use icons, shapes, and elements with ease. Choose from thousands of elements for your designs. Access a great selection of fonts perfect for every design. The best way to understand Canva is to try it!” – Canva
“Use of our platform and publishing tools is 100% FREE! You can create, embed items on your website and play as much as you like. Playbuzz’s content formats are optimized for maximum social interaction and sharing, so don’t be surprised if your audience starts to grow in numbers and engagement performance once you start publishing with us. And don’t worry – any time a user clicks on a Playbuzz-powered share button on an item embedded on your site, their social post will link back to your hosted page.” – Playbuzz
Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.
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Small businesses run a large spectrum of industries, but one thing they all have in common is smaller budgets and less personnel for operations and marketing than larger competitors. One important equalizer among small businesses is the ability to set up a website and drive traffic to that website for little to no costs (outside of your precious time). Learning more about SEO (search engine optimization) will help you create a web presence that attracts customers. However, you don’t need to be an SEO expert to use these tips and tools to drive local traffic to your website.
With reputation marketing, you want to build a positive online reputation and use that stellar reputation to get consumers to trust and buy from your business. Reviews, business listings, and even your blog posts are all part of your online reputation. Review sites have a huge impact and finding the right review sites and networks to post and promote your customer reviews gives consumers the information they are looking for when researching the right place to buy something and comparing similar providers of services and goods. In today’s consumer’s mind, no reviews is bad news and a five-star reputation is all the reason they need to choose one business over another.
Reputation Marketing Quick Tips:
–> Business cards, brochures, letterhead
–> All channels of advertisement
–> Email signature lines for all employees
–> Social media profiles
–> Business listings that allow website listings
–> Review site business listings
–> Part of the conversation when networking
–> Online forums and commenting on other blogs
–> Press releases and sponsorship listings
Stay in front of your customers with email marketing to drive local traffic to your website. Have an email opt-in on every page of your website or use a pop-up (SumoMe – free) to capture email addresses you can use for your email campaigns. Invest the time to actually learning all the features of your email provider and you’ll be able to automate most of the email marketing process. Fully automated email campaigns can be set up to send a specific email for every action by the customer from sign-up to purchase. Dig into your analytics and segment your subsriber lists to customize content.
Social media gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to interact, educate and advertise to current and future customers and clients. There are hundreds of free social media networks and websites, but the most important thing to remember is to be where your customers are. BE ACTIVE, make connections and engage your followers with posts they find useful or entertaining while sprinkling in some self-promotion.
Social Media Quick Tips:
Customers need a reason to visit your website and blogging is one of the top ways to drive local traffic to your website. Quality content that answers their questions and solves their problems not only gives them a way to find your business in search but also a reason to click through. Grow your business’s web presence by showing you’re a knowledgeable leader in your industry. Build relationships with similar or complimentary websites where you can post content to each other’s website and link back to drive local traffic back to your website.
Here are a few Blog Quick Tips:
Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.
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