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The mobile handset market is evolving at a rapid tempo; Because the cost of smart phones, the most robust and powerful of the mobile market, is falling almost as quickly as the companies are innovating, the rate of adoption is skyrocketing. More powerful handsets mean more people accessing email on their mobile devices. More varied devices means there are more challenges for email marketers than ever to getting email to render correctly and as intended. In order to achieve the most similar rendering across the greatest number of mobile email handsets and OS's marketers should keep the following in mind:
 Verify your code for accuracy and W3C compliance. Code that is not compliant can cause the rendering of your HTML emails to break. Just because your email looks fine in a browser does not mean it will render correctly on a native mobile email client or in the off-chance that a user loads a webmail client on a mobile browser.
 Run your code through an HTML TIDY to take care of any trailing or open tags. A single extra tag can cause all of the links in your email not to become hyperlinked on a Blackberry 2.x device. Tidying your code is like proof reading a manuscript before it goes to press. Make sure that your code includes all of the necessary components of a valid HTML document including a DOCTYPE declaration, head, body, opening and closing HTML tags.
- Be sure to send a TEXT part when sending a multi-part MIME. Older versions of Blackberry devices, Blackberry 1.x, render the text part of multi-part MIME. If no text part is present then recipients will see raw HTML code and your message will be lost as recipients struggle to scroll through your code and all your formatting tags to deduce what you’re trying to sell.
 Avoid using nested tables as they do not render on older version of the Palm Garnet OS. The new PalmPre will render both nested tables and CSS, but older versions have limited to no support for CSS and render nested tables problematically, throwing off your entire email’s layout.
- Consider getting rid of your pre-headers as they can push your calls-to-action and branding further down the page and effectively OFF the first screen that the customer sees. Position your calls-to-action and branding as high up and to the left as possible to ensure that if your email is larger than the available screen, or if it flows over the side, the recipient can quickly and easily identify your company and the product you are selling without having to scroll left or right (or up and down for that matter).
- Avoid using very long subject lines as they will push your email down the screen by taking up too much header space. The subject line is more important than ever: The new Palm Pre highlights the subject line using a bright blue background with white text, prominently setting it apart from the rest of the message. A carefully crafted subject line will have that much more punch because of it.
  
- Remember to use Alt-Tags in your image URLs. Not every mobile email client has images turned on by default. As a matter of fact, on Blackberry 2.x, for example, images appear as URLs when the Blackberry email parser strips out all of the HTML formatting tags. An Alt-tag is a free opportunity to brand yourself and make it easier for a recipient to identify you. In addition, Google’s Android turns images OFF by default, so it’s important to have secondary branding mechanisms in your emails like Alt-tags when you can’t count on images being on by default.
 Keep your emails small and light. Not every smart phone owner is flying along the 3G mega pipeline, nor are they all connected to Wi-Fi. This means that your users are spending precious time downloading your emails on their mobile phones. You want to offer them an email that loads as quickly as possible to make sure they don’t feel like they wasted their time waiting for your missive to load. Additionally, older Blackberries only load part of the message and prompt the user to “load more”. By keeping your messages small and the code efficient and devoid of overly-large images, you’re ensuring the user will get the most value with the least amount of action required on their part.
- If you are linking to a mobile version of the email or a mobile site keep it under 20kb. The W3C has recommended that mobile websites and mobile emails should be under 20KBs total in size. Remember, just because you sent a small and light email, any link to your site in that email should lead to a mobile friendly website that will load quickly on a smart phone. You could lose your customer’s attention if the page is too big and filled with unsupported elements. Mobile browsers have come a long way, but they are still not quite on the level of a desktop browser, so avoid resource intensive elements such as Flash as the majority of hand held devices will not render it.
- Test, test and test some more. If you have access to a world-class tool like eDesign Optimizer your testing will be a snap. By sending a single email you can see what your message looks like in all of the major smart phones on the market, not to mention the leading web and software based email clients. Testing is imperative in today’s market place: the capabilities and rendering of email clients run the gamut from no support of HTML, to rich support of HTML and CSS across the spectrum of hand held devices and native email clients. Unless you test your messages you will never know what your customers see and read when they receive your emails. If you don’t have access to eDesign Optimizer then contact us immediately, or, use your colleagues and friends in your company and send them emails and make sure you know exactly what your customers see.
More than 1 billion people around the world will be using smart phones by 2013, according to a recent study from the Radicati Group. Everything is getting smaller and more compact. If you’re not optimizing for the smaller screen, you’re already behind!
Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Dir. of Partner Relations
& Industry Communications
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