This Valentine’s Day, Find Love in Mobile Email Messages

You may think that with the variety of channels the public is using to communicate digitally, that email is on its way out. But even with the rise of social media, text messaging, blogs, and more, email is still number one, not only in our hearts, but also on our mobile devices. While social media has an important purpose, the numbers show a different story. In both the private and public sectors, email is the communications king and email accessed by mobile device is certainly the queen. In 2012, 43% of emails were read on mobile devices, and it’s predicted that by 2017, that number will rise to 78%. This dramatic rise should shape the way you’re designing your email messages.

Email leads the digital empire with 3.2 billion users worldwide compared to 1 billion Facebook users and 500 million Twitter users. And according to a study by PEW Research, 94% of adults online leverage email. With such a large and powerful user base, email is an essential foundation to digital communications. As a government communicator, email should be at the core of your digital strategy. While social media is playing an increasing role in digital communications, it’s important to recognize that it isn’t replacing email. People are using more technology in general; being more social, more digital, more mobile, and more than ever, email is a critical way to get your message heard.

How can you get the most out of messages being sent to a mobile audience? Based on our What’s Next E-book, we’ve compiled three ways to keep your emails simple and readable.

1. Make your calls to action prominent: The finger is the new mouse. You need to make it easy and user friendly for your reader to act on your email. Designed to be used on-the-go, mobile devices are small and mobile emails will shrink down more than they would on a desktop.
2. Entice the reader to click through for more information: Keep your content clean and concise. Make sure to keep things short and to the point, but include a link to your website for readers to see the rest of the story.
3. Don’t copy and paste from a word processing program: Most word processing programs (such as Microsoft Word) will insert unnecessary and unseen code into an HTML email if you cut and paste it into your email software. Oftentimes, this will cause your email to look strange, and you won’t know why. Cut and paste your text into a basic text editor such as Notepad and then copy that into your email solution. Taking this extra step will strip out unwanted code and make your emails display better in various email clients.

We’re digging deeper into emerging key trends in digital communications and falling deeper in love with email messaging. Read more on optimizing email for mobile devices, leveraging technology, and maximizing effectiveness of multiple communication channels in our e-book, What’s Next, and expand your stakeholder connections even further.