Making it through the mobile email filter

With the increase of consumers that own a mobile phone, more and more email is read on smartphones. But mobile email has its’ own set of rules.

Mobile email can now account for 15 to 75% of email opens and that percentage is still increasing. So marketers have to take mobile email marketing more seriously.

But the first question is:  How to get through the mobile email filter and reach that subscriber on the go?

Mobile email as a first filter

Many users prioritize their email when viewing it on their mobile. 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 emailing when they land in the mobile inbox
Urgent and interesting emails are checked and answered first. After that they progress through the rest of the emails, deleting or mentally labelling the uninteresting ones.

Effectively keeping the most interesting emails to open on a different platform even if they read it as mobile email first. B Looking at it that way, our goal is to make it through that mental mobile email filter and stay undeleted. ut this is only a very small percentage. According to a recent Knotice report, only 2,39 percent of emails opened both on desktop and mobile, so you want to be in that double openers category, but how to get there?

Value and brand: Coca-Cola has a head start

As with all email, the presentation and technical aspects seem less important to the end user than the content, well we will get back to that.

But the value of every message is 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 types 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.

But you have to make sure your email looks good on mobile too. Because if an email does not display correctly, 69,7% will delete it immediately according to a study by BlueHornet.

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 real preview pane so we can count that one out for mobile email filtration.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Extend your subject line with the Pre-header
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 to get through the mobile email filter. The mental filter that is hard-wired in the brains of all your subscribers 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. Read more about creating a mobile email strategy.


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