Top 3 Problems for Mobile Emails: Excessive Scrolling, Poor Layout and Too Much Content

In Yesmail Interactive’s white paper, “Mobile Email Design: Marketing Fit for the Small Screen,” the company offers an overview of the challenges to designing emails for mobile devices.

It also highlights the two tactics that can be used: scalable design and responsive design.

Mobile email’s surge
According to Yesmail, 36 percent of emails were opened on mobile phones in the first half of 2012, up from 27 percent in the second half of 2011 and 20 percent in the first half of 2011. The trend toward a day when more emails will be opened on mobile devices than on desktop computers isn’t too difficult to see.

Despite this, companies and agencies are dragging their feet to respond. Research from Econsultancy shows that 37 percent of companies say they have a basic strategy for optimizing email marketing for mobile devices, while 16 percent say they have a moderate strategy, 6 percent say they have a quite advanced strategy and 2 percent say they have a very advanced strategy. The numbers are similar on the agency side.

The problem and the solution
This slow shift to adjust to the mobile consumption trend shows in frustrating experiences reading emails. Forty-two percent of consumers say mobile emails are difficult to read because of excessive scrolling, while 29 percent point to wrong layouts for mobile screens and 27 percent point to excessive content.

The two tactics to use to improve emails for mobile devices are scalable design and responsive design, according to Yesmail.

Scalable design
Scalable design is “an email layout that, when reduced to half its size