How to make an email visually appealing on Apple Watch
We recently talked about how voice assistants are redefining email design to some extent. But what about smartwatches? Today we'll look at how to make an email visible on Apple Watch.
Smartwatches and other wearables have the ability to synchronise and therefore receive emails. The problem for the sender is that, a priori, watches can only display a few words of the email received. Specifically, the sender y part of the issue. In fact, this could be the reason why they are used more to determine whether or not the email is of interest and whether or not to delete it, and less to read the email in situ.
However, you need to know that if we click to read it, the Apple Watch will only show us the plain text part of the email. Why does this happen? Because when the watch detects a remote image in the email, it considers the HTML to be too complicated, and so it shows the plain text version. So how can we display all the information we want?
First of all, we should be clear that emails usually have two parts: HTML (text/html) and plain text (text/plain). If we include an additional HTML part to the message, with the content type "text / watch-html", the Apple Watch will use the "watch additional" part instead of the plain text part when the HTML part is not suitable. You may need the help of your ESP or email provider to set up the third Watch part, but if you succeed, you will have an email that users will see correctly on desktop, mobile and Apple Watch.
Visually enhance your message
If you're looking to make email look more attractive on Apple Watch, do not use strong styles or tags to increase the weight of the font, use <b> in their place. Divs are not necessary, nor are most styles respected (with the exception of non-black text colours). Finally, be sure to avoid indentation or other organisation in the HTML, as the "watch" format includes this extra space in the message.
How do I make the images look good?
This "watch" version of the email poses some problems when it comes to images. The watch changes the size of the embedded images and inserts a transparent border of 2px (4px on retina display), causing it to distort.
How do we solve it?
We will have to resize the images and make them 4px x 4px bigger. This way, the Apple Watch will resize it back to the size we really want.
If you want to experiment with embedded images, remember to use them only in the "watch HTML" part, as embedded images have little support for displaying in the HTML part of other email media.
Source: You will find this and more information at Litmus.
