Email, web, and social are among the most popular activities on mobile devices.  If your mobile content strategies for these three areas are not working together you maybe frustrating your subscribers. 

Mobile Web or Native Mobile App

If you have a special tool or gadget the native app is probably the way to go. But for most publishers looking for a creative way to distribute content and interact with subscribers a mobile website is going to be a better approach. The new HTML5 standard features combined with the right Content Management System are all publishers need to create an award winning mobile site.

Mobile users are clicking on your links from social networks or other aggregaters. So, it is important that what displays when they click comes up fast and looks good, if you want to grow your audience. Just detecting a mobile device and altering the display is not good enough. Subscribers are demanding sites that take advantage of the new advanced feature offered with HTML5. But just making your site HTML5 compatible may not be enough either. To really create the advanced capabilities from the new HTML5 standard you need a Content Management System that supports cache management, delayed tracking and offline ad serving.

Integrating Desktop and Mobile Web

Do not treat your mobile site as a separate medium. Make your website adapt to mobile. It maybe tempting to maintain separate sites for mobile and regular web, but separate sites means two sets of URLs and more efforts to keep both updated. This is a particularly thorny issue when trying to maintain branded URLs for SEO and social network sharing. An adaptive approach extends your existing site with new features for navigation, caching, and offline viewing without loosing important site features.  There is no need to increase subscriber efforts to view archives, search, or get at other information that is readily available on the regular site.

Email on Mobile

Right now 30% of mobile phone users are reading emails and newsletters on smartphones, and depending on your audience this percent maybe much higher. Having a mobile optimized email design is important. Subscribers should not need to do any extra work to read your emails and get your message. Making the reader stretch, scroll, or squint means more effort and will decrease response and interaction rates on subsequent mailings. Another consequence of poor mobile design is that subscribers can push side bars off the viewing area; thus, mitigating the impact of embedded marketing messages and ads.

The steps for creating a mobile adaptive email are easy.  If you have control of your email newsletter formats you can make the simple adjustments.

 For more details please review our whitepaper  "Mobile Strategy and Design - A Guide for Publishers".