Just make stuff easy for people to consume.
A couple of weeks again we shifted over to a responsive email design for The Fetch. For those new to responsive design, it’s an approach aimed at creating products and websites that adjust and optimise readability for whatever view format they’re in – be in desktop, tablet or mobile. (And maybe even wearable devices like Google Glass!)
We’d be meaning to make the shift for a long time but when you’re a resource-strapped startup, going responsive is one thing and for email design, another. After more nudging from our audience to make the change, we were lucky in that we had the amazing Ros Hodgekiss from Campaign Monitor (our email partners) to lead the process. (As an aside, CM has some great resources available on responsive design in their Guides section.) Our two-column link-loving format at The Fetch wasn’t something I wanted to lose and with this new design, we didn’t have to. When you now view the digest on your mobile you see one easy-to-read column and when back in the browser, the two-column. Check out the hybrid layout below:
More emails are now read via mobile than on a desktop email client or via webmail. Check out this post for the statistics. Pretty huge thing to take in but I feel this is really representative of my own behaviour. Every time I’m on the go, such as walking to a meeting or checking my mail when I wake up and go to bed (a bad habit I don’t like to admit!), it’s all via my iPhone. Our community currently opens The Fetch anywhere from 20-25% (across city) on a mobile device and these are people who are often at their desks working…
It’s also been interesting to see how our metrics have altered in a short period of time. Our unsubscribe numbers (which are already < 0.5%) appear to be going down and trackable forwarding of the emails has gone up. My conclusion is that readers are more likely to switch off, disengage and remove themselves when they can’t absorb what’s in front of them. Before, The Fetch involved a bit of pinch and zooming to be legible on a mobile and due to the amount of links included, could look overwhelming. The forward to a friend/coworker link was also hard to locate pre-responsive days and now it’s nice and clear. What hasn’t been noticeable yet is any difference to our click-through and open rates. Hoping to see if these go up over the coming months.
Since this update, I’ve been going on a bit of a general responsive craze – changing my personal blog as well as this one over too. I’ve also turned off the stock mobile themes that often come with WordPress in favour of keeping the original styling.
There are many others things to consider with creating beautiful email products, which I’m not got to touch on here. If you’re recently gone responsive, feel free to do a show and tell in the comments below.
For more ‘inbox love’ articles, check out this piece on ‘Email-led startups‘.
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Hi Kate,
I find the WP automatic responsive layout for mobile not too bad for the theme I use so was wondering why you chose to “turn off the stock mobile themes that often come with WordPress in favour of keeping the original styling.”
Cheers,
Kaye
Hey! It’s because content is about what you say and how you say it. Part of that is the delivery and design that wraps it. The generic WP theme does not help curate the foundation you want your content to stand on. Whereas keeping some design elements from the responsive layout (like our logo, menu, header image, font and font size) helps tell the bigger story.
Hi Kate, thanks for sharing. We had similar findings when switching an online lifestyle daily to a responsive email campaign.
Have you found any noticeable change in click rates for featured articles? That was the biggest immediate impact we discovered.
I am glad you have changed it and I may just resubscribe. Really love all your work Kate, but when the subject line of The Fetch email tempts me to open and then I cannot find one single item that made me open the email (lots of reasons not just design) – the result is utter frustration. Don’t want you to be associated with frustration in my mind, so I unsubscribed a little while back and just hop online every now and again to see what is going on.
The subject line is a teaser for the content – it’s usually a summary of a couple interesting articles and a few events, which are mostly listed at the top of each section. We work long and hard to provide the complimentary service to the community and are motivated to keep going by positive comments from people who understand we’re doing what we can with nothing.
Cheers!
Hi Kate,
I’m really enjoying being able to access theFetch without pinching and zooming – you’ve done a great job.
Good on you for publishing your results. We found pretty much the same thing – no significant increase in open or click rates – in some cases, the click rates actually dropped. We did a lot of A/B testing with the Daily Addict emails and at the end of the day, the responsive related results didn’t justify the expense.
What was valuable to DA was spending time understanding email reader behaviour and being able to test heads / copy / layout. This however is an expensive consulting service which is much harder to scale as a business.
My perspective now is that responsive email is a hygiene factor – if you’re bleeding customer attention, then it may stem that but it’s a small part of the puzzle.
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