Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Email Engagement Checklist: Handheld Devices

More and more of your constituents are likely to receive, review, and respond to email via handheld devices (PDAs) such as Blackberries and Treos. As a handheld user myself, I use my Treo as an inbox cleanup device. Every day, I get a few hundred emails. When I have down-time—waiting on a plane, on the phone, sitting in a meeting—I use my Treo to decide which emails I can delete right away and which I want to keep for later, when I have access to my computer. With that said, the rules here are a bit different from when you’re delivering to a computer. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself:

• Is my design flexible? Now that handheld devices have become ubiquitous, subscribers have a lot of choices as to how they interact with your email. Your design must be flexible enough for you to deliver your message to various media formats. This extends beyond HTML versus text format considering that hand-held devices that are supposed to render HTML oftentimes mangle the message. You’ll need to do some testing to see what happens in that case.

• Have I handled images appropriately? What looks great on a computer (images, formatting, etc.) is often turned into ugly links and codes on a handheld. The quandary is that graphics can be very successful in driving engagement. I’m not saying that you should send text email all the time, but you should manage your creative so that you at least have a chance of engagement if your email is rendered ...