Mobile Optimisation 2014

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1 IAB Marketing Series 2014 Ryan Hickling, Head of , TMW

2 Landscape Over the past two to three years we ve seen a massive change in the way consumers interact with brands digitally. As technology evolves so do user habits which in turn means that campaigns and strategy must change with it. At the moment mobile devices are driving this change. Some of the latest mobile statistics: Mobile opens have grown by 21% in 2013, from 43% in Jan to 51% in December (Litmus Analytics Jan 2014) Stats show that 49% of is now opened on a mobile device. (Litmus Analytics Jan 2014) 68% of UK smartphone owners used their device to check in the past 30 days. Only text messaging was more popular (92%). (Nielsen, The Mobile Consumer Feb 2013) 49% of users read s on their smartphone immediately when they wake up. (Apsis The Barometer, on mobile devices 2013) 91% of consumers check their at least once per day on their smartphone, making it the most used functionality. (ExactTarget Mobile Behavior report 2014) If you need any more stats in order to help you validate mobile optimisation you can find these and others here: Mobile devices are causing consumers to reassess the value of brand campaigns. Do they find traditional desktop only newsletters and alerts relevant and useful now that they are reading s on smaller devices? Smartphone owners will now be reading s on the go whilst commuting, during TV shows and commercials. It s vital then, that your campaigns are able to adapt to this new setting. The aim of this white paper is to ensure that you are able to make informed decisions on how to mobile optimise your own s and benefit from the new opportunities that mobile presents. Platforms What do we mean by mobile optimisation? This refers to the act of improving the design and usability of your campaigns on smaller screened devices such as smartphones and tablets. All of these devices use different operating systems such as Apple s ios and Google s Android. You will find that these devices handle your s in different ways. Apple devices such as the iphone and ipad offer users a very controlled environment. This means that the user experience on all Apple devices will be practically the same. In contrast, Google s Android devices offer users many different options. For example, the way a user reads their through a Samsung phone may differ greatly from the experience of a HTC or Sony mobile. Although all of these devices run Google Android, each one will offer users different applications to read their mail through. At the time of writing this paper (March 2014) Microsoft Windows phones and Blackberry OS 10 devices also offer a comparable mobile experience.

3 Challenges Design adaptation Whether building a new campaign from scratch or adapting existing creative, you will want to keep the following points in mind: 1. What screen size/s should you optimise for? For example, is a desktop only version sufficient or is it worth investing in both a tablet and mobile (portrait) version? The answer to this will be driven by your device reporting statistics and how useful it will be for your brand / communication. 2. When building the mobile version (down to as low as 320px in width) what content is vital to the campaign and what can you hide? For example, when using responsive design, you can choose to hide unnecessary copy and images from the mobile version thus reducing the overall size of your and making it easier for people to read on smaller screened devices. campaigns will often include large images that can either be hidden completely or shrunk in size. It s also vital to keep your copy as concise as possible. When reading on a mobile long paragraphs will end up taking the full width of the screen and forcing users to scroll further to reach your call to action. 3. Be mindful of the total size of your campaign (images and HTML) Given users will be loading your campaign over mobile networks it s important that the images load quickly and are compressed as much as possible. Although super fast 4G is now available in the UK, you still need to cater for those on slower 3G connections that can drop to lower than a 1MB/s. You should aim for your images to be low enough in file size that they load within seconds of the opening. Device reporting Currently device type reporting on your campaigns can be reported on through either open or link tracking. Each time a user chooses to download images within your campaign and register an open event, your analytics should be recording the device and operating system of the user. This is also available when a user clicks a tracked link that goes via your broadcaster or website analytics. Ask your broadcaster if they support device type reporting now. It s vital that you are aware of how your audience is consuming your campaigns. It s these figures which will help you to justify mobile optimisation and also inform you of how many different screen sizes you should be considering. For example, from the device usage are your readers mainly mobile phone users or tablet users? If your current reporting provider does not support device reporting, third party tools are available to use on an adhoc basis (for example Litmus Analytics).

4 Keep in mind that there are limitations to device reporting: People who do not interact with your will not be reported on This often skews mobile device usage towards Apple products such as the iphone and ipad. As Apple s Mail App often downloads images automatically, users on these devices are far more likely to register open events than those on other platforms. A user could open your within their Android device but you would never know unless they click to download your images or click through on your call to action. Android devices can be misrepresented As today s Android devices can take on the form of anything from Google s own Nexus brand to Samsung, HTC, Sony, LG, Asus, Alcatel and more, not all of the opens and clicks from these devices may be reported on. This is due to a combination of the reporting tools available not being able to accurately attribute all of these to Android but also the devices not identifying themselves correctly. Make sure you research device purchase habits of those you market to and see if your reporting stats agree. QA & device support Before beginning any mobile optimisation make sure you are set up to test your campaigns across all the new devices you ll be targeting. Currently there are two main methods you can use to test your campaigns on mobile devices: Third party inbox snapshot tools Your own device test lab Third party tools are a great way of quickly testing your s on a wide range of devices. These services are often purchased on an adhoc basis and will return your test results after a set amount of time. If you are short on time or do not wish to buy your own test devices, this is the way to go. Example providers include Return Path s Inbox Preview tool and Litmus.com Previews. There will be times when these third party tools do not cover exactly what you wish to test on or may not be reliable enough for your needs. For example you may need to test your within a specific app on an Android device that is not covered by default. There are also times when the screen shots returned by third party tools do not reflect what you see in a live environment. If you ever need to be 100% sure that your renders fine on a specific device you need your own mobile device test lab. Open Device Lab s are another potential source of test devices you can use. This is a relatively new community movement aimed at providing shared pools of internet connected test devices for the public to use. More details can be found here: For more information on device test labs see details of those used at TMW here:

5 Coding practices When coding mobile optimised s, there are several approaches available. Each method will generally change depending on the design and objective of the campaign. Fluid Design This method of mobile optimisation takes a single design and ensures all content within the is able to shrink or re-flow as the screen size reduces. Commonly this will be achieved using percentages rather than fixed values for the width of items within the design. This then allows the content within the to dynamically scale to the size of the screen. Fluid design is most suited for simple s with a one single column layout. An example might be service triggered off by user interaction. Responsive Design Responsive s are generally more complex than fluid layouts as they allow the design to change more radically between mobile and desktop. With this method of optimisation you will be coding a single that swaps layout elements, formatting, styles and content depending on the screen size of the device. Responsive design offers you the greatest control over what users see on their mobile device vs their desktop. Support for responsive layouts across the mobile industry is constantly changing. As such you will find that certain apps may default back to the desktop version. This is currently quite common on Android due to the large number of different apps available. Its ability to safely degrade back to the desktop version is another example of how great responsive design is. At the time of writing this white paper (March 2014) you can safely say that responsive s will work across all recent Apple products and the default Google Android app. Your experience may vary on older Blackberrys and Windows Phones. stats compilation - TMW testing strategy - Open device labs - Mobile stats from Return Path - Coding advice from Campaign Monitor - Litmus community site useful for chatting to developers - New blog by Action Rocket detailing coding practices - Responsive coding guide from MailChimp -

6 Glossary / Further Reading - stats compilation - TMW testing strategy - Open device labs - Mobile stats from Return Path - Coding advice from Campaign Monitor - Litmus community site useful for chatting to developers - New blog by Action Rocket detailing coding practices - Responsive coding guide from MailChimp Published April 2014 Follow [email protected] Visit us: Call us: