Reading email on a smartphone is now the norm

Half of readers open email on a smartphone, so the email we send has to match that habit.

Responsive email means email that displays its content in the best possible format across different clients and different screens — computer, tablet, phone — whatever the format, orientation or size. On a phone in particular, it should be neither too small nor so large that the reader has to scroll around to get through the message, because people reading on a phone essentially want to control it with one hand.

According to figures from an American company, in 2015 it sent over a million emails to various clients, and half — 50% — of those clients opened on a phone.

The company sent both responsive and traditional non-responsive email, and the statistics turned up another significant finding: among clients reading on a phone, 58% were willing to click a responsive email, while only 46.7% clicked a non-responsive one. Similarly, 57.2% of phone readers were happy to open a responsive email, against 51.7% for a non-responsive one.

What the data shows is that in an age of smartphones, the mobile office has become the office-without-walls — anywhere is the office. Email has to keep up: it has to render correctly across different smart devices, with clear content, visible structure, and a call-to-action button that is neither hidden nor so large it irritates. That is exactly why responsive email needs to exist.

Producing responsive email used to require writing code. Today it takes nothing more than drag, drop and typing, much like working with a clipboard. Given that, the sensible move is to act now and use our platform to build the responsive email your customers will appreciate.