I’m writing this post from a train on the way back to the office from a client meeting in the beautiful city of Bath, and I was reminded again just what an amazingly flexible medium email is.

In the course of my day I have read my email on my cell phone, and used both my 3G connection and a public wifi hotspot to download emails to my laptop. When I needed to write a message that was longer than I could manage on my phone, I logged onto a webmail site using a browser on someone else’s computer.

There simply is no other digital medium that is anywhere near as forgiving about how you read it. To enable Web pages to display happily via a slow connection, or on a tiny screen, requires a massive amount of work to sniff out which browser is being used, and then to serve a version of the page that best suits it. For email, it just happens.

Or rather, it just happens provided the email content is text. And that’s a crucial point here. I’ve written about the usefulness of text emails in the past, but I think it’s equally important to make sure that we consider the needs of mobile email users when we send email.

With multipart emails available by default on email service providers, there isn’t much of an excuse for not providing customers with a useful text version of the email. Yet I’ve lost count of the number of messages I see on my phone (which displays the text part) telling me that I have to visit a Web page in order to read the message - and, what’s worse, implying that it’s my fault that I haven’t got my email client correctly configured. Most ESPs allow you to create a text part based on the words from the HTML - so it surely can’t be beyond the wit of production staff to come up with something that accurately sums up the message and contains links so I can find out more if I want to.

One of the (many) curses of Outlook is that it doesn’t behave properly when you set it to read emails in plain text. Rather than simply displaying the text part - which is what you’d expect - it decides instead to be ‘clever’ by coming up with a version of the HTML part that just munges the graphics. Many of our clients ask how best to test, and I’m always recommending that they set up a different email account and then use a better-behaving client, such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird, to view the emails.

So whilst email is flexible, there’s no excuse not to take advantage and make use of that flexibility. That way we can get our message to as many people as possible, which is surely the goal of every email marketing campaign.

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About the Author 

Kieran Cooper is senior manager of support services for Lyris' international operations. Located in the Lyris UK office, he is responsible for account management, implementation and support.

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