Mobile Email Performance for E-Commerce Brands

An ecommerce company recently approached my team to do an email audit as they were facing challenges with low open and click-through rates. After analyzing their email account, here are our main recommendations to revive their email marketing channel: 1. Strategic Email Segmentation: Currently, your emails lack personal relevance due to a one-size-fits-all approach. This is a crucial area to address. Action Plan: Implement segmentation based on purchase history, engagement levels, browsing behavior, and demographic information. 2. Personalized Content Creation: Generic content won't cut it. Your audience needs to feel that each email is crafted for them. Action Plan: Develop emails specifically tailored to the different segments. This includes curated product recommendations, personalized offers, and content that aligns with their interests. 3. Subject Line A/B Testing: Your current subject lines aren't doing their job. You need to be implementing ongoing A/B subject line tests, as this is low-hanging fruit to improve your open rates. Action Plan: Regularly test different subject line styles and formats to identify what resonates best with each segment. Keep track of the metrics to inform future campaigns. 4. Mobile Optimization: A significant portion of your audience reads emails on mobile devices. Neglecting this is causing a decrease in your email engagement rates. Action Plan: Ensure all emails are responsive and visually appealing on various screen sizes. Test your emails on multiple devices before sending them out. Additional Campaign Strategies We Recommend: - Launch a Monthly Newsletter: This should include new arrivals, style guides, and user-generated content. It’s an excellent way to keep your brand in the minds of your customers. - Seasonal Campaign Integration: Tailor your campaigns to align with holidays and seasons. This approach can significantly boost engagement and sales during key periods. - Re-Engagement Campaigns: Specifically target subscribers who haven't interacted with your brand recently. Offer them unique incentives to rekindle their interest. Next steps: 1. If you found this helpful, please leave a comment and let me know. 2. If you own/run/work at an Ecommerce company doing at least $1 million in annual revenue, message me so my team can audit your email channel to see if there's a good fit for working together.

POST 6/7 👉2025: Why Design Is Now a Deliverability Signal—Not Just a Branding Element. Good design doesn’t just get attention. It gets delivered — to the right part of the inbox. Let’s get one thing clear: Promotions is inbox. Updates is inbox. What matters in 2025 is avoiding spam, not forcing Primary. If your email is expected, renders cleanly, loads fast, and respects UX principles, you're in the right place. Too many ecommerce marketers still underestimate how much design affects deliverability. It's no longer just about what looks good. Design performance is now tied to how your domain is scored by Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook. Here’s how. Mobile-first rendering: Over 74% of ecommerce opens now happen on mobile. If your layout breaks or loads slowly, you're triggering behavior Gmail sees as friction — not engagement. Load speed and responsiveness: Gmail and Apple Mail monitor how quickly your message displays and how long the user interacts. Heavy layouts or large imagery can cause quick exits, reducing future inbox trust. Dark mode compatibility: Unreadable emails in dark mode break the experience. Invisible text or poor color contrast are quietly penalized. Accessibility: Skipping alt text, using tiny fonts, or low-contrast layouts may technically deliver your message — but visually fail for many. Those silent exits hurt engagement scoring. Real-world case: A brand redesigned its templates with GIFs, AMP, and rich visuals. On desktop? Beautiful. On Gmail mobile? Broken. Result: click rates dropped, complaint rates rose, and inboxing fell. They reverted to fluid layouts, lighter assets, and simpler code. Engagement and delivery recovered within 2 sends. Email design checklist for 2025: 1. Keep size under 100KB 2. Use system fonts 3. Code mobile-first, not retrofitted 4. Preview in both dark/light modes on Gmail and Apple Mail 5. Always use alt text 6. Avoid base64 images and fixed-width tables 7. Load-test AMP and interactive elements 8. Match design tone with your website 9. Ensure contrast and readability pass basic checks Takeaway: Every second of lag is a penalty. Every failed render hurts trust. Gmail is evaluating design behaviors—not beauty. Design is no longer just branding. It's inbox access. #email #emailmarketing

A common mistake I see brands make is relying on their own inboxes to test email campaigns. But just because it looks great on your device doesn’t mean it will for your customers. What's often not taken into consideration is how your campaigns render across the 60+ platforms and devices your customers might be viewing your campaigns on. This means that while you and even your team might see a beautifully designed, well-put-together campaign, your customers might be seeing a completely skewed design. Not quite the outcome you'd like... And without proper testing, that beautifully designed campaign could appear distorted, unreadable, or even completely broken for some recipients. Dark mode is a perfect example. It's estimated that around 40% of users have dark mode enabled on their devices, yet most brands don’t test how their emails render in dark mode. The result? Logos that disappear, unreadable text, and broken design elements that ruin the user experience. Internally, we use Litmus to check formatting, links, and deliverability before sending and while this is our go-to, Sinch Email on Acid also does the trick and is much more cost-effective for brands. To give you an idea, here's what you can do using a third-party tool like Litmus or Emails on Acid: ✔️ Ensure emails display correctly, including in dark mode ✔️ Make sure all links work ✔️ Confirm compatibility across 60+ devices ✔️ Prevent email clipping, especially in Gmail (102KB limit) ✔️ Minimise human error by testing beyond just your inbox ✔️ Validate mobile responsiveness ✔️ Provide proper authentication to avoid being flagged as spam ✔️ Monitor for blocklists and spam placements ✔️ Check email load times to avoid slow rendering ✔️ Review accessibility compliance (contrast, font size, readability) I’m still waiting for an ESP to integrate this functionality directly - it would be a game changer. Until then, proper testing is non-negotiable.

Desktop email is NOT the same as mobile email. Most brands forget to optimize and adjust their emails for mobile devices—and it ruins their design. What happens? 👉 Products stack awkwardly, breaking the layout. 👉 Images and text become misaligned. 👉 The email looks messy, causing customers to bounce instead of buy. Here’s an email from LARQ—the desktop version looks perfect, but on mobile, the same products stack incorrectly, making the email look awful. Since 70%+ of emails are opened on mobile, ignoring this is a huge mistake. How to fix it? ✔️ Test every email on both desktop and mobile before sending. ✔️ Turn off mobile stacking. ✔️ Check for any errors and padding issues missed in the desktop version. A clean, easy-to-read email = higher conversions.