Responsive vs Mobile E-Newsletter Templates
October 23, 2015 | Email design, Email Marketing

Some of the biggest names in email marketing are featuring “mobile-friendly” templates for their users. With more and more people reading their email on phones and other smaller devices, it’s important to consider mobile when designing e-newsletters, read more about why mobile matters here. However, there is a big difference between a “mobile-friendly” template and a responsive template.

With a mobile-friendly (but not responsive) layout, your newsletter may look narrow or squished on larger screens.
Mobile-friendly templates
These “mobile-friendly” email templates are designed specifically for users reading their emails on smartphones and tablets.
Sounds great right? Nope!
The problem is that they are designed for mobile devices only. This means if someone on your mailing list opens the email using one of these templates on a desktop they will still see the narrow layout and small images intended for a mobile device.
These mobile-only templates are not smart enough to figure out which the device is being used. They serve up the mobile version no matter what. Even if your email list is dominated by smartphone users, there is no way to guarantee that someone is viewing your e-newsletter a mobile device.
Mobile-friendly is not enough!

With a layout that adapts to your device, your viewers get a great reading experience from large to small screen.
Responsive templates
The solution to have your email look good across multiples devices is to make sure that your email template is responsive.
Responsive means that it “responds” or adapts to the size of the device it is being viewed on, making images and layouts larger for desktops and smaller for mobile devices and tablets. Something called a media-query checks the size of the device receiving the email, and then determines which template version to use to display the content of the newsletter.
Are you using a responsive template?
To make sure your emails look their best for everyone who is receiving them make sure that your template is responsive and not just mobile specific.
Here at Mail on the Mark we make sure all of our client templates are responsive. As we customize your design, we can change the size of photos and text based on the device size, we can create multiple columns on desktop and switch to one column for your smartphone, we can even have elements show or hide depending on the size of the device.
Contact us to have us get started on responsive template for you.