Make Your E-mails Mobile-friendly

If you’re like many professional practices, you use e-mail to communicate with your clients or patients. E-mail marketing is a cost-effective way for practices to share information and educational materials. By sending newsletters and announcements, you reinforce to your clients or patients the idea that you care about them.

But there’s a catch. And it’s seemingly growing more and more significant by the day.

It won’t surprise you that more patients, clients and/or referral sources than ever before are reading their e-mails on their smartphones. Reliable statistics on the exact proportion of mobile readers is difficult to determine, because the technology is changing so rapidly. But the use of smartphones to read e-mails is now rivaling and even surpassing the use of desktops and laptops.

Keep up with your mobile readersYour practice must communicate with your audience on its terms. This means you need to ensure that your e-mails can easily be read and acted upon via mobile devices. As a colleague at WPI Communications cited recently, if the message doesn’t open properly, people won’t wait to read it on their computer. They’ll simply ignore it or delete it.

To state the obvious, smartphones have smaller screens than laptops and desktop monitors. They also use different operating systems. This means that an e-mail that looks perfect on your computer may amount to gibberish on your client’s or patient’s smartphone.

This is something we consider at WPI Communications. We optimize our e-mails for multiple platforms, including HTML text, alternative text for images and plain-text versions. Then we test them for wide computer screens, tablets and smartphones. We also test our eNewsletters like Pediatric Dental Bites and the PT eNewsletter to ensure they work on formats like the iPhone.

This is crucial because, while we take great pride in delivering exceptional digital and print content for the legal, accounting, financial planning, physical therapy, health care specialty and dental industries, we know that if mobile users can’t read it, it won’t matter how good our content is.

Follow these three tips to make your e-mails mobile friendly:

1. Make subject lines matter. E-mail subject lines have always been critical, but this has never been truer than it is today. Smartphones make it very easy to delete messages. Make sure your e-mail subject lines are meaningful to your readers, interesting and short.

2. Keep testing. Never stop testing the functionality of your e-mails so that they can be read on mobile devices. Be sure that your content loads quickly and properly.

3. Remember the call to action. The best marketing e-mails, even those for a professional practice like yours, should prompt the reader to take an action. Make it easy for her to

understand the call to action and to take that step. If it’s a link she should click, that link should be very easy to respond to on her phone.

If your clients or patients are going to read your e-mails, you have to go to them. You have to be mobile friendly.

About the Author:

Steve Klinghoffer, with his wife, Lori, founded WPI Communications, Inc., in 1984. He helps professionals market their practices through a wide range of editorial-based tools, such as client and patient newsletters, referral-generating newsletters and Web site content. Over the past 28 years, Steve has worked with thousands of physicians, dentists, physical therapists, accountants, attorneys, financial planners and other professionals to help them build their practices. For more information visit http://wpicommunications.com.