Responsive Email in Marketo – Simplified

A large percentage of your customers are probably reading your email on their mobile device. You want this to look the best it can and be easy to read and interact with. What good is a call to action in your email if it’s too small to read or click on? With a responsive design, you can solve this problem and have great looking emails on most devices and get the best response rate you can.

Marketo has recently updated their Responsive Email Template available to everyone to import from the Marketo Library (previously called “Mobile Email Template”). Marketo has had this for a while, but this template was buggy and had some issues. It looks like most of that has been worked out and it’s now a real good starting point.

 Marketo Import Program Dialog

Marketo Import Program Dialog

After importing the templates you will have a new program with the email samples as well as new email templates in Design Studio.

One of the emails created is “Antwort-3-cols.”  This is a great starting point as it has multiple columns and images and is simple enough to modify for basic use.

When getting started, I’d recommend either doing one column, or if you want to section things off, to use columns of equal size. While something with a sidebar (for example 70% body, 30% sidebar column) can work, it’s a bit more complicated especially if you’re just getting started.

Here’s what the Antwort-3-cols email looks like both on the desktop and on an Android phone:

Desktop Email ExampleMobile Email Example

From our tests one of the email readers that does not render it perfectly is the Gmail reader on Android (surprisingly). Most Android phones have two email clients “Gmail” and “Email.”  The stock Email client works great, but Google’s Gmail client does not support all the features required for responsive emails to look their best. But you do what you can and try and have it look the best it can in the most email clients.

 If you would like to get more advanced with responsive email design, I suggest the tutorial that Campaign Monitor has: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/guides/mobile/

It’s a great overview and shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to read. You’ll need a good understanding of HTML and CSS to be able to do more advanced things, but it’s worth it to have that email that stands out, and most importantly, is read!

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