Mobile email marketing Strategies, best practices, and tips for success — Stripo.email

Mobile-first email marketing isn’t just about shrinking designs to fit smaller screens — it’s also about understanding how people engage with content when they’re on the move, distracted, or juggling tasks. The most successful mobile-first campaigns take this behavior into account when marketing, allowing marketers to lead with clarity, anticipate interruptions, and design with the quirks and constraints of touch interfaces in mind.

This article offers practical guidance to help email marketers create mobile-friendly email campaigns that are visually polished and aligned with recipient expectations. It also explores common pitfalls of ignoring mobile optimization.

Key takeaways

1. Design for real mobile behavior: People often open their emails on the go during quick moments, such as on breaks or while multitasking. Content should be scannable, quick to load, and immediately valuable.
2. Small layout decisions have a big impact on performance: Email performance depends on subtle design choices, such as proper image scaling, clear CTAs, and single-column layouts that adapt to mobile screen sizes.
3. Consistency builds recognition: Aligning your mobile emails with your brand’s tone, visuals, and other digital channels helps recipients instantly recognize and trust your messages.

Modern mobile email campaigns

Key mobile usage statistics:

Today’s mobile users expect more from email marketing. They want messages that are easy to scan, visually aligned with the sender’s brand identity, and written with a consistent tone of voice. Recipients also appreciate when brands make the most of the limited screen space on mobile with features such as carousels, though this can be challenging for marketers aiming to keep their email code lightweight.

Mobile usage has fundamentally changed how people interact with email. Recipients often open messages during quick moments, such as commutes or lunch breaks, or while multitasking. They scan their emails quickly, expect concise content, and often rely on slower network speeds. Designing with these behaviors in mind is the key to ensuring your emails don’t get overlooked.

Best practices in mobile email marketing

Focus on the following best practices to improve the chances of your email marketing campaigns looking great and functioning smoothly on mobile screens.

Use a single-column layout

Responsive email templates use CSS media queries to apply different styles depending on screen size and orientation. While multicolumn layouts often require complex adjustments, a single-column design simplifies the process and reduces reliance on advanced styling, thus improving compatibility across different devices. These layouts ultimately reduce the need for recipients to zoom or scroll sideways, which can be especially annoying to do with one hand.

Keep screen rotation in mind. If recipient flips their phone horizontally, your layout should adapt accordingly, as screen width is effectively doubled in landscape mode. You can either code a responsive email template yourself or use a no-code email builder that automatically optimizes layouts for different screen orientations.

(Source: Stripo template)

(A single-column layout offers consistent experiences on mobile and desktop)

Maintain brand consistency

Your logo, color palette, button styles, tone of voice, and key messaging all contribute to your brand’s personality. Make sure your email design aligns with your other channels, such as websites, social media, mobile apps, and paid ads. This consistency helps customers quickly identify and remember your brand, no matter where they encounter it.

Design emails for tap-friendly interactions

Make sure social media icons, buttons, and other interactive elements are large enough to easily tap, especially on smaller screens. The experience breaks down when mobile device users need to zoom in just to click on elements.

Also, leave enough space between footer links such as “unsubscribe,” “manage preferences,” or “privacy policy.” This prevents accidental taps on wrong links, particularly for people with larger fingers or those holding their phone in one hand.

(Adjust icon size and spacing to ensure easy tapping and leave enough space between footer links)

Reduce email size to prevent clipping

Gmail clips email messages that exceed a certain size, hiding the full content behind a “view entire message” clickable element. When this happens, tracking pixel used to calculate open rates may also be clipped, leading to inaccurate tracking.

To avoid clipping, keep your email size below the limit — approximately 20 KB on iOS and up to 75 KB on other mobile devices. You can reduce your email’s size by replacing header or navigation bar blocks with a single image block, removing section background images, or moving long sections of text or detailed product grids to landing pages instead of loading everything into the email.

Compress images

Image compression ensures faster email loading times, especially on mobile devices, whose users are often on the go and have limited bandwidth (in contrast to desktop computer users, who generally enjoy high-speed internet).

To further improve performance, consider using fewer images and removing frames from animated GIFs.

Optimize content

The following tips will help you write mobile-friendly emails that are easy to understand, quick to scan, and likely to drive clicks.

1. Spend time on preheader text

The preheader is a line of text that appears after the subject line in your subscriber’s inbox. As you have limited space to convince subscribers to open your email, use a preheader to complement your subject by briefly explaining what the email is about, its value, and what actions reader can take after reading the email.

2. Keep your sentences brief and clear

Concise language helps your readers understand your message quickly, particularly on mobile devices, whose users have short attention spans. Follow these tips to make your email text easier to absorb.

• identify phrases with similar meanings and keep only the phrase that most specifically conveys your idea;
• use fewer abstractions and instead include precise examples;
• write as if you’re explaining something to a close colleague who needs a quick, helpful answer.

3. Use headings and line breaks to make easy-to-scan emails

Headings and line breaks divide your email into clear sections, thereby helping readers quickly find the information they want.

(Source: Stripo template)

(Line breaks, subheadings, and proper spacing serve as clear visual cues that make emails easier to navigate)

4. Provide a strong and strategically placed call-to-action

Instead of using generic phrases like “Click here,” focus on clear action verbs such as “get your discount,” “shop now,” or “try our new features.” Position the CTA logically within the email according to natural reading flow.

(Source: Stripo template)

(Ensure that your CTA stands out and follows natural reading flow)

Reduce the scroll

According to a 2021 report by Statista, people spend around 10 seconds reading brand emails. While this study is somewhat outdated, it’s unlikely that the average reading time has increased significantly in recent years. With inboxes becoming increasingly cluttered and bite-sized content continuing to rise thanks to platforms such as TikTok, recipients don’t expect to scroll through an abundance of content just to locate the information they need.

There’s no strict rule for how much scrolling is acceptable in an email, but keeping the most important information easily visible prevents readers from losing interest.

HubSpot reports that sales emails with 75–100 words tend to get the best response rates. While this doesn’t mean that every email must fit this range, it’s worth testing different lengths. Also, pay attention to the emails in your inbox that have impressed you the most — chances are that they got their structure right without requiring you to scroll too much.

Consider adding interactive elements and video teasers

Marketers use interactive elements that work directly within the email and embed animated video previews to boost engagement and click-through rates. This approach shifts recipients’ perceptions of email from a static message with text and links to a more dynamic, enjoyable format.

Don’t overuse these elements, however. When too many visual or interactive features are packed into an email, they can compete for the reader’s attention and increase loading times, particularly on mobile devices.

Interactive elements

Interactive features such as image carousels, accordions, surveys, or quizzes can increase user engagement when there’s a lot of content to explore or when your goal is to entertain and delight mobile readers.

Stripo allows you to add surveys, NPS forms, short quizzes, carousels, and AMP accordions to your emails by simply dragging the corresponding module or block into your templates. You can also use our no-code gamification module generator to create questionnaires, NPS surveys, mini-games, and product review forms. You can then export the module directly to your Stripo account or download the code for further use.

(Source: Stripo template)

(Auto-scrolling image carousels make your mobile emails compact and dynamic)

Video teasers

Most email clients don’t support video playback; however, you can use a clickable thumbnail that links to the video or use an animated GIF as a teaser, since GIFs are widely supported.

(Source: Stripo template)

(Stripo lets you choose custom thumbnails and apply play-button styles to your video blocks)

Provide an easy-to-find unsubscribe link

Every marketing email you send must include a simple, visible way for recipients to unsubscribe from future messages. This allows you to build subscriber trust, comply with GDPR requirements, and maintain a good sender reputation.

Perform email rendering tests

While sending a test email to yourself and checking it on your smartphone is a good start, no one has access to all the popular mobile devices.

Email rendering tools such as Email on Acid simulate dozens of combinations of email clients and devices, allowing you to catch design inconsistencies and ensure that your email effectively adapts to different screen sizes.

Analyze email marketing campaign results

Most email service providers, such as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor, provide you with real-time data on delivery rates, open rates, and click-throughs, allowing you to optimize your mobile campaigns. It’s crucial to dive deeper into user behavior on mobile devices and move beyond just analyzing key metrics. Determine which links get tapped most often, how much time recipients spend reading your emails, and where they drop off.

Additionally, pay attention to the device and email client data provided by your email service provider. Knowing your target audience’s primary mobile operating system (e.g., iOS or Android) and email client (e.g., Gmail or Outlook) informs your design and testing strategies.

Finally, A/B testing subject lines and layouts helps you gain valuable insights into what resonates best with your mobile users.

Avoid these errors in mobile email design

Emails that are hard to read, slow to load, or frustrating to navigate are far more likely to be ignored, deleted, or marked as spam than emails without such issues. Overlooking mobile optimization can result in distorted layouts, poorly scaled images, and inaccessible tap targets, leading to poor experiences for mobile users.

Here’s an example of the same email with mobile-specific CSS (on the left) and without it (on the right). The version without mobile CSS has barely visible text and smaller images:

(Source: Campaign Monitor)

(An email using mobile-specific CSS and the same email without such CSS)

Now, let’s look at some common email design pitfalls — and how to avoid them — so that your email doesn’t end up looking like the one on the right.

1. Using rigid layouts that break on small screens

This often happens when fixed pixel units are used for dimensions, margins, or padding, which prevents elements from scaling correctly on smaller screens. This can also result from using absolute positioning without placing elements inside a relatively positioned parent container. To identify layout issues, inspect overlapping elements in your email editor’s code view or use your browser’s responsive design mode.

2. Adding images without responsive styling

When images are inserted without responsive styling, they can appear too large, overflow the screen, or force unwanted horizontal scrolling on mobile devices. To prevent this, use CSS properties like max-width: 100% and height: auto, and always define image widths in relative units where possible.

Also, remember that images should be optimized for fast loading and include alt text to support accessibility.

3. Placing CTAs that are hard to tap on mobile

CTAs should be large enough for smartphone users to tap comfortably, even with larger thumbs. In addition to size, add sufficient whitespace around the button to make it stand out and reduce the risk of mis-taps.

To meet accessibility standards, ensure your CTA buttons or links have a tap area of at least 44 by 44 CSS pixels, as recommended by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If multiple elements perform the same action (e.g., a small icon and a nearby text link), only one of them needs to meet the minimum target size. That recipients have at least one accessible way to carry out their intent is what matters most.

4. Overlooking accessibility

Accessibility is sometimes treated as an afterthought in email design, despite it directly impacting how subscribers interact with content. Failing to meet accessibility standards can exclude people who rely on assistive technologies or have visual or motor impairments.

Here are a few simple ways to make your emails more inclusive and accessible:

• use accessible fonts, such as OpenDyslexic, Comic Sans, or other sans serif fonts;
• write meaningful alt text for images and GIFs;
• structure your content using proper headings and subheadings rather than just increasing font size;
• use actual list structures (
  ,
  1. in HTML, or built-in bullet/number tools in editors) instead of typing dashes or numbers manually;
  2. set line spacing to about 150% to make it easier for readers to track lines;
  3. add punctuation marks at the end of bullet points and every sentence, including in headings.

Learn more by checking out our guide on email accessibility standards and best practices.

Wrapping up

Subscribers expect mobile-optimized emails that are quick to load, visually appealing, and easy to navigate, even during fleeting moments such as commutes or lunch breaks. Following mobile-first best practices, such as using a single-column layout, optimizing images, making content more concise and focused, and designing tap-friendly interactions, allows you to enhance your user experience, increase open and click-through rates, and foster long-term engagement.

Seemingly minor design choices, such as scaling images properly, avoiding layout distortion, or placing CTAs in places where recipients can easily tap, can make a significant difference in how your mobile marketing campaigns perform.