Email template development guides, tutorials, tools

Finding a responsive email editor that transforms results for your business is easy when you know exactly what to look for. Here are the bars you should make sure they clear, when you search the field for a responsive email editor.

Make It Mobile

More than half of commercial emails like yours are being opened on mobile devices. What’s more, a majority of Americans (and almost half of Europeans) say they’d rather close or delete an email that’s not mobile optimized.

When your email is mobile-optimized, it reformats itself for handheld devices or tablets. Reformatted content, larger navigation buttons, and images that fit show up when the user opens your message.

You have to be mobile or you just aren’t on the playing field today. So it’s basic to choose a responsive email editor that makes everything you do accessible to your mobile prospects.

Make It Fit

Compatibility with mobile devices is just the beginning. Different platforms, service providers – and even industries – have requirements you have to satisfy to make sure your emails get opened.

Choose a responsive email editor that has invested the thousands of hours it takes to research and program in account compatibility –* *giving you a face that your prospects will recognize whether they are looking through Windows, munching Apple OSX, peering through Outlook, or even taking Lotus Notes. (Yes, there are still Lotus-eaters.)

Your truly responsive email editor has to deal with these compatibility issues, and even more.

Make It Work

You can have a responsive email editor that serves you far beyond the mere mechanics. Look for one with the expertise to lead you to the most productive use of “the soft stuff.” Your responsive email editor should be one that aims as much time and talent at staying on top of the most productive practices in content as well as in technology.

Best practices in design, copy, images, personalization, testing, and staying out of that spam filter are dynamic. They change with consumer behavior. Success depends on satisfying complex algorithms that adapt all the time, with use and experience.

Your responsive email editor should be the one that stays on top of all this for you, keeps you informed, advised, productive – and up-to-the-minute.

Your Responsive Email Editor – What to Look For

Responsive Email Editor Flexibility

You want flexibility in design for your templates. “Anybody can do it like everybody,” so design flexibility is a powerful tool for standing out in today’s blizzard of information.

Your responsive email editor should offer you abilities to adjust settings like background color, padding, size, text weight and text height for each section of your email, in almost any setting.

Without ever starting from scratch, you should be able to make your emails appear customized.

You want a responsive email editor that gives you the power to engage your audience and prospects. This means finding one that gives you more than just the tools. This also means finding one with a grip on all the factors that make engagement happen more often, more consistently.

Don’t give up. You don’t have to settle for a responsive email editor that is strong only in design, only in programming and compatibility, only in flexibility or ease of use. Your responsive email editor should have resources committed to every area that influences engagement, giving you all the key factors for success.

The power you want is the power to influence the attention and time of your audience. This is a complex, ever-changing balance of technology, and human behavior. Your responsive email editor is one that is expert – and stays expert – in both sides of that balance.

Top Responsive Email Editor Features

Save your favorite elements to use again and again. Templates are just the start of productivity. Make sure the pieces that work for you are easy to keep on the case.

Drag-and-drop capability is one feature to be sure of. Ease of archiving templates, images, layouts and all manner of content is another. When your emails are rolling you don’t want to re-invent the wheel just to keep them fresh, topical and relevant.

Your email marketing can be the highest-ROI business generator in your arsenal. It still consistently shows up at or near the top marketing tool in terms of ROI. So every day your email is not tuned-up is a day you may be leaving money on the table.

“But didn’t I hear that ‘email is dead’?”

The “gee-wow” phase of social media growth gave rise to that rumor, but it never was true. Social media certainly have a role, but their proper use is labor-intensive, and consumer sensitivity to commercializing social media is a built-in hurdle.

A 2015 Adobe research study in England found that two-thirds of millennials still prefer to get marketing offers by email, and only 6% prefer social media channels. (Even direct mail, at 20%, outscored social media significantly in the millennials’ preference!)

The last name might be “media,” but the first name is “social,” and that has to be overcome by those who use it for marketing. It would be dumb to say social media doesn’t work, but it does represent a difficult instrument to play.

And it’s worth noting how often social media marketers are using it to add to their email lists!

So now’s the time for you to make your responsive email editor a top priority.

Additional Reading