Making it through the mobile email filter

Mobile email: it is email in the palm of your hand. With the increase of users that own a smartphone or a mobile device like a tablet, mobile email is also increasing.

At this moment Mobile email can account for 10 to 30% of email opens. Not something to just wave away. You might even feel the need to create a mobile email strategy. So how do we get through the mobile email filter and engage with the recipient?

Mobile email as a first filter

Many mobile email users prioritize their email. They might still behave in a chaotic always on, always busy kind of way, but there is some logic involved. Truly urgent or personal emails are treated differently than commercial emailings landing in the mobile inbox.
Urgent emails are checked and answered first. After that they progress through the rest of the mails, deleting or mentally labelling the uninteresting ones. Effectively keeping the most interesting emails for a different platform. Looking at it that way, our goal is to make it through the mobile email filter and stay undeleted. But how to get there?

Value and brand: Coca-Cola has a head start

As with all email, the presentation and technical aspects seems less important to the end user than the content. And every message is for a largely determined by the sender. Meaning that different people or brands sending exactly the same message get a different response. This is the same for both desktop email, mobile email, and all other type of communication.

So working on the ‘whats in it for them’ at the same time as working on the ‘who is in it with them’ gets the largest increase in email results. Let’s go back to purely mobile email.

Make your content scannable: 3 key elements

In filtering the mobile email,  there are three key elements. The items that show at first glance. In a mobile inbox there is no preview pane, so we can count that one out for mobile email filtration.

Optimized Sender Name
Your sender name needs to be recognisable. So be sure to use a consistent one. Keep the sender name short too, as you only have a limited number of characters that will be displayed, the rest gets broken off.  Ditch the “Newsletter” in the sender name and keep it to the brand, person, organisation or campaign name. The one that they will recognise. If you are doing a combined name and brand, put the most recognisable  first.

Subject line for mobile email readers
The subject line also suffers the same fate as the Sender Name; only a limited number of characters are shown. For this reason it is advised to frontload your subject line. Put the most compelling information first. This might be different for different segments of your email list, using dynamic or personalised subject lines you can optimize them for the individual.

Pre-header as an extension of the subject line
Next to the sender name and subject line, many mobile email clients also display the pre-header text in the inbox view. Extra space for capturing attention. So be sure to make use of the pre-header. A preheader text is the first line of text that is found in the email. It would be a loss to use this valuable space in the mobile inbox to say “click here for the online version”. You can see your pre-header text as an extension to your subject line.

The next step for your mobile email

We have covered how get through the mobile email filter. The mental filter that is hard-wired in all your subscribers brains to quickly recognise non-important email. Your email might be opened the desktop later, could be opened directly on the mobile itself or ignored altogether. Know that passing the first level of filtration, is just the first step.