Best Practices for Email Responsiveness

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Nate Laning 2
Nate Laning 2 ✭
Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
In researching moving from NetCommunity to Online Express, I was pleased to learn that Online Express emails are automatically coded to be responsive. It was a major selling point for us.



Are there any best practices to follow in building emails to provide the best responsive behavior on tablets and mobile? For example, is it better to select "best fit" for image sizes, as opposed to defining a specific pixel width? When introducing a row with multiple columns, how do the different columns respond on a smaller phone screen?



Some guidance would be appreciated from those of you who have already mastered the world of Online Express and it's WYSIWYG email editor. Thanks in advance!
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  • Matthew Garbarino
    Matthew Garbarino Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    Hi Nate - great post!



    Hopefully some other folks using the product will chime in, but I thought I'd share some thoughts.



    Best fit vs. actual size: Either way will work just fine on mobile - if you specify a width of 525 pixels, it will be that size on desktop clients, but scale down for mobile. In general. "Best fit" does this with even less effort on your part, the image simply fills the space that it can. We see "best fit" used the majority of the time.



    Column stacking: Columns stack from left to right, just as you would expect. Keep this in mind when you design your content. Left columns stay on top, right columns wrap underneath. We are looking into adding a mobile preview so you can see a rough idea of how it will stack before you send it.



    General best practices: A lot of the very best emails I see are the most simple. Remember that people's inboxes are a busy place, and attention spans are short, especially on mobile. Be as concise as possible, be engaging, get your user's attention, then give them a clear call to action. A common pitfall I see is that emails try to contain *way* to much content. For example, it's almost always better to send a very brief & compelling article summary with a call to action to "Read the full article" than to just send the entire article in the email.



    And above all else; always try new things and learn from the results. Test and measure!

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