Tips for Creating Mobile Friendly Newsletters

It's no surprise that mobile usage in recent years has increased drastically. Today's mobile users often consider phone calls and text messages secondary functions on their devices, while everything from using social media apps, browsing the web, and of course checking emails are their primary uses. As of March 2017, data shows that 54% of emails were opened on a mobile device. That number continues to increase.

If you're using email newsletters as part of your practice's marketing strategy, it is important to create mobile friendly e-blasts so your message is delivered and properly displayed to all your recipients. To make your newsletter mobile friendly, here are a few tips to help guide you during design.

Related Article: 5 Examples of Great Dental Newsletter Practices

A Clean, Responsive or Single Column Design


When optimizing for mobile, it is important to realize that the limitations of screen space is the primary driver. Crowd it at your peril. Mobile users are willing to scroll down the screen, but not pinch and zoom in to read through the text.

A responsive template uses CSS to help control the layout of the e-blast on various screen sizes, most usually displaying multiple columns on a desktop, and single column on smaller screens.

A Single Column layout is an even simpler responsive layout that stretches the width of a single column up to a usual maximum size of about 600 pixels (which will increase as screen resolution gets better and better over time.

Either solution, will allow you to create a design that is mobile friendly, concise, and to the point, providing an optimal experience for your readers. A single column template becomes the lowest-common-denominator approach, while a responsive design allows you to take more advantage of desktop sized screens. Why not always go responsive? Because there are a surprising number of mail apps that don't yet fully support the CSS media queries’ which enable this functionality. So you might end up doing extra layout work that can't be taken advantage of on some email apps.
Remember, the greater the viewing experience, the higher amount of engagement, and the less chance of unsubscribers.

Here's an example of a newsletter for Toronto Children's Dentist, based on a 600 pixel wide responsive design. Much of the content is split into two columns on the desktop and shows as one column on smaller screens with the images shown above each text section.

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