Page 21 - Grapevine May-June 2019

In The Winery

best practices to follow.

THE MOBILITY EFFECT ON DESIGN

When we first started using email regularly in the
workplace, it was before the PalmPilot, BlackBerry,
or iPhone. We viewed emails on computers at
our desks. Emails took the place of memos, which
took the place of letters––so formal, long format
text was the norm. With the increasingly fast pace
of technology adoption, our lines between work
and non-work on a computer have blurred con-
siderably. We used to read work emails at work
and personal emails at home. Now, even though
you may have separate work and personal email
addresses, they go to the same mail account and
everything is mixed.

The speed and ease of glancing at email on
mobile devices has revolutionized how we con-
sume email, and we are reading more emails
than ever. According to the 2018 Deloitte Mobile
Consumer Usage Survey, the average consumer
checks their phone 52 times per day.1 We use our
personal phones at work and our work phones at
home. We have access to email 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, and there are few times when
we are unable to open an email.

With over half of our emails read on mobile devic-
es, we have changed the way we interact with
Email: The Biggest Tool in Your promotional emails, and with this, our expectations

have changed. We expect to be able to see the
Digital Marketing Toolbox content on our desktops, tablets, and phones. This
is what “mobile optimization” means. On mobile
devices we require buttons to show large enough
By: Susan DeMatei to be able to click them, we need to see the pic-
ture tightly cropped and close up, and we expect
to read the copy without having to scroll sideways.
Remember that email is a tool to drive traffic to
your website to purchase. If the email cannot be
read on a mobile device, 80% of us are more likely
to delete it than to save it to be opened on another
device later. With people looking at their phones
50 times a day or more, there are multiple oppor-
tunities to capture their attention.

Paying attention to design in such a small space
is critical to click through rates. While people are
looking at their phones and therefore email more
than ever, our attention spans are reduced. An
email must be clear and concise while effectively
communicating the desired message. As the old

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