2015 will be the year of Responsive Email Design
It seems incredible that we have had to wait so long to see responsive design become a reality in the email marketing sector, but today, at Digital Response we dare to say that 2015 will be the year in which this technique becomes commonplace for brands. There have been many limitations posed by email clients and great the effort of the developers to develop hacks that would allow us to create customisable emails according to the resolution of the reading devices. And at the end of 2014 we began to notice that brands are jumping into the responsive design pool and email marketing professionals feel much more comfortable with this technique, which is nothing new in the field of web design.
Why didn't it come sooner?
As we said, different email clients have limitations when rendering our HTML/CSS. Not all services interpret all CSS rules, some add classes that break our layout and some still ignore everything we declare in the tag, preventing us from applying media queries. All these limitations and incompatibilities mean that companies don't want to take the risk that their email might not look right on ALL clients.
What has enabled change in 2014?
At the end of 2013 we were beginning to see some opening statistics on mobile devices which forced us to focus on techniques to improve the user experience. At the beginning of 2014, mobile open rates had already reached 50% and the need for mobile solutions became indisputable. Due to this data, this year has opened a very intense debate on the opportunity that responsive design poses in the field of email marketing. Developer forums and communities such as that of Litmus have enabled the sharing of problems and solutions, the use and knowledge of which has been spreading. These communities, together with an increase in companies' concern for mobile usability (driven by openness data), have accelerated the process of implementing this technique, despite the fact that email client support is still not optimal, we have learned how to circumvent the problems and produce usable emails. on all devices by combining different techniques.
Trend in email development
The use of "secure" techniques is widespread for most email clients in order to create adaptive structures. However, not everything is possible, and the application of responsive design and its limitations in email must be taken into account in the design process. of the contents, to achieve an adaptable and usable email that reaches the inbox of our recipients. Given that with responsive design, the complexity of the layout increases considerably, it is very useful, to reduce the problem and development time, to achieve templates reliable, with common structures that can be reused.
To get responsive emails, usable and optimised for deliverability, we recommend you to read the following articles:
