187. Email Marketing › how it works › getting started • Host your email newsletters online and link to them from your preheader. That way, anyone who opens your email on a mobile – even those whose mobile phones display emails in plain text – can click straight through to an HTML version of your newsletter. • Design your email in a grid system. This means your content needs to be laid out in vertically and horizontally aligned blocks, with gaps in between. Doing this will make it easier for various operating systems and email clients to scale your email down to fit a mobile screen. • Again, make sure that you include alt text for your images! Your email needs to convey its message with or without images. • Mobile devices that don’t automatically scale your email down will display the content on the left of your email first. Make sure that your most important content is placed here. • Button links need to be at least 44px to render well on mobile phones. Something important to remember: Design for touch. Many mobile devices have touch screens. This means that, instead of clicking on your links with a mouse, users will be tapping at your links with their fingers. If your links are placed too closely together, it will be difficult for them to click on one link without accidentally also tapping the other. To make the user experience easier, make sure your links are placed in a 30 – 45px area, with a margin of at least 15px around it. By spacing links like this, it will be easier for touch screen users to follow through on your Call to Action. This is not a guarantee that the email will display properly in mobile, but it should solve the problem for most mobile devices (like iPhone and Blackberry) which auto-fit HTML emails. Create Content Email content that is relevant and valuable to readers is vital to ensuring the success of an email marketing campaign. Valuable content is informative and should address the problems and needs of readers. It is important to realise that the reader determines the value of the content, not the publisher. Successful email campaigns provide value to their readers. This value can vary from campaign to campaign. Newsletters can offer: • humour • research • information • promotions • exclusive content184