10 Tips for a Mobile-Friendly Law Firm Newsletter
With the rise of cell phones
With the rise of cell phones, email marketing has had to adapt to an increasingly mobile audience. In fact, recent studies have shown that roughly half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. One study from Adestra even found that more than 70% of emails not optimized for mobile are deleted in under three seconds.
In short, subscribers expect a mobile-friendly newsletter—and law firms that don’t deliver will fall short of their potential. The good news is that it doesn’t take much to optimize emails for mobile viewing.
Here’s how to get started.
1. Use a Responsive Design
Responsive emails automatically adjust to fit the size of whatever screen they appear on. Without this feature, an email that looks great on a desktop could appear garbled and poorly sized on a smartphone. Fortunately, responsive email design is a common feature for most email automation platforms.
2. Don’t Overuse Images
While visuals are an essential aspect of digital marketing, cluttering up an email with too many images is never wise. Images often take quite a while to load on mobile devices. Even when they do load, they may cause formatting errors.
3. Format Your Subject Line
To boost your newsletter’s open rates, you always want to write subjects that grab your audience’s attention. While subject lines can vary in length, most smartphones only display up to 40 characters when viewing an inbox in portrait mode. Anything beyond this will be cut off, weakening your subject line.
(Most digital marketers recommend restricting your subjects to 30 characters or less.)
4. Don’t Forget the Preheader
A preheader is the preview text that appears under a subject line in your email inbox. Typically, this will be the first line of your email content. However, you can customize your preheader text any way you choose. As with the subject line, this can help catch attention and increase open rates. For mobile devices, a range of 30 to 50 characters is usually ideal.
5. Keep It Brief
When it comes to email content, less is more. If subscribers open your newsletters and find a wall of text, they aren’t likely to open them again. A good rule of thumb is to keep the body content of your emails to 200 words or less. (Though you can add links to longer blog posts or videos so interested readers can get more information if they choose.)
6. Break Up the Text
Another good way to avoid giving readers a wall of text is to break it up. Separate the content into subtopics and arrange them in blocks, each with its own subheading. This will make your emails more digestible—especially for mobile readers.
7. Use Large Fonts
No one wants to squint at their smartphone screen to figure out what an email is trying to say. Make sure that you use a font large enough for easy reading on a mobile device. Somewhere within the ranges of 16–20 pixels or 12–15 point type is standard.
8. Stick to a Single-Column Layout
When breaking up text into boxes, marketers will often arrange them into parallel columns. This is great for desktops, but on a mobile device, it can be cluttered and difficult to read. When formatting emails for mobile, make sure that the content renders in a single-column layout so subscribers can scroll through it more conveniently.
9. Embed Buttons
Buttons always beat standard links in an email. Buttons stand out from the content and don’t give the spammy appearance that links can. Plus, large buttons are much easier to tap than links.
10. Test and Optimize
Even after you’ve tweaked your law firm’s newsletter for mobile viewing, there’s always room for improvement. Try out different approaches and see what works best. Are your open rates increasing? Are you attracting more leads? Are you keeping emails out of the spam trap?
Track your success over time and keep optimizing your emails for better results.
How About a Little Help?
By putting these tips into action, you can give your firm a mobile-friendly newsletter. However, managing an effective newsletter takes time, energy, and patience. If you’d rather let someone else handle the headaches, we can help.
At Let America Know, we give attorneys across the nation the support they need to achieve growth through email and social media marketing. One of our services is a customized monthly newsletter.
Just contact us, and we can:
- Design an appealing newsletter for your firm
- Write valuable content for your target audience
- Raise visibility for your brand
That way, you can focus on doing what you do best: serving your clients.
Learn more about our fully customizable e-newsletter service designed for trial attorneys like you.