Best of ’09: Smartphones killed the email star

Best blogs of 2009 From our 2009 best-of the IPG Lab blog series:

Email marketers are in a dire situation. Many of them don’t know it yet. One of the major activities for smartphone users involves checking email. For marketing emails, while the current best practices dictate formatting emails to support both text-only and HTML email clients, the HTML versions don’t scale well to smaller devices. This is a big problem.

Thing is, as smartphones get smarter, more and more are working to support HTML emails in their email clients. The iPhone is a great example. Any email marketers reading this should find someone with an iPhone, and pull up their emails on it. If they’ve been using text only, with a graphic here or there, it should look alright. But if they’ve established a graphical header, or formatted the email with a fixed width, the text should be just about impossible to read right now.

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