Compatibility and responsive email design: the key issues

Litmus put together the following chart on mobile email apps and their compatibility with responsive email design (in 2013).

Do you find something strange on it? Yes… Gmail, one of the most popular email reader application on mobile devices, doesn’t support the technology. What does it mean to users?

Android users aren’t left behind with non-responsive (in many cases: ugly) emails since you can always go with a different email client on your phone. For example the native Android email client supports responsive design techniques. Having said that, responsive email design has something to do with the application and not the device’s operation system. If the app supports Media Query then you’re on the good track. That makes rendering  responsively designed emails possible throughout different email apps both on Android as well as on iOS devices.

What else?

The compatibility question however doesn’t stop at the readers’ email reader application. You need to make sure that your actual email is going to look good across devices. Image size, automatic scaling, image swapping with text are just the most important elements that you need to watch out for. Complete compatibility can be achieved by making constant and small changes to your email.

I cannot help but tell you again that testing is a key phase in your design procedure. We use for example Litmus, Emailonacid and own test devices to make sure that our generator delivers perfect responsive emails. This way we can cover more than 90% of the market. Make sure that you always test your email across devices or even email client apps. Don’t forget, a properly designed responsive email increases your conversion rate that you can turn into making more profit.

Compatibility is always a pain, especially if we’re talking about portable devices, operating systems and email clients. There are heaps of solutions on the market and the number is increasing. You need to make sure that your email is fully compatible and consider a wide scale of aspects. Do spend time on this issue before sending out massive amount of emails.

If you prefer to skip coding and testing, give EDMdesigner a go, and build your templates with an easy to use drag and drop interface! Or just drop us a line, if you want us to make your emails responsive.