Mobile-Friendly Email – What You Need to Know

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If you are sending marketing emails, with or without email links, and your emails can’t be viewed properly on a mobile phone, then they aren’t working and they aren’t being seen by anyone.

Email Statistics as of January 2015:

  • 47% of Email Opens are now done on a mobile device.
  • If the email has a link to a website, the website is also being viewed on the mobile device.
  • People now look at their mobile device an average of 150 times per day. These brief interactions mean that your mobile emails and your website must focus on getting your point across quickly.
  • 80% of people delete an email without reading it if it doesn’t look good on their mobile device

Mobile phones already dramatically affect how people access and view emails. Local mobile searches now exceed desktop mobile searches, and the number of people treating their smartphones as their main internet device grows daily.

What makes a Mobile-Friendly Email?

Mobile friendliness means most of the following “responsive design” characteristics must automatically adjust when your email is viewed on a mobile device:

  1. Hierarchy (order) of things shown
  2. Fonts and Sizes
  3. Colors
  4. Layout (columns, etc.)
  5. Image Scaling and Size
  6. Padding (spacing left, right, and horizontally)
  7. Visibility: Hiding certain content

Ask yourself one simple question:

  1. Do your marketing emails and newsletters automatically adjust to be seen properly and allow easy response on a mobile phone? (Try them and see.)

If you can’t answer yes, you need to take action now.

How to get help

Dealing with someone you know and trust is the key factor to address these issues.  If your current email and web support person has experience with “responsive design” and understands your email process, they are the ones to call on.

There are, however, lots of people who will try to sell you partial update services, but few of them understand the whole marketing picture. Deal with someone who does.

We can help you do this effectively, within your budget, and quickly.

How We Can Help

Mobile-Friendly Search Ranking – Google Changes The Game

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Google has once again shaken up the “search” world.

Mobile phones already dramatically affect how people access and view your website and emails. Local mobile searches now exceed desktop mobile searches, and the number of people treating their smartphones as their main internet device grows daily.

On April 21st Google Started Using “Mobile-Friendliness” as a key website Ranking Factor

Have you ever tapped on a Google Search result on your mobile phone, only to find yourself looking at a page where the text was too small, the links were tiny, and you had to scroll sideways to see all the content? This usually happens when the website has not been optimized to be viewed on a mobile phone.

This can be a frustrating experience for mobile searchers. Starting April 21st, to make it easier for people to find the information that they’re looking for, Google is adding a “mobile-friendly” label to mobile search results as well as including it in search scoring.

This mobile friendly search ranking is important to you

If your website isn’t what Google defines as “mobile friendly”, your rankings are about to suffer.

Here’s a good explanation about Google Mobile Search Scoring:

http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/blog/morning-edition/2015/03/google-prepares-algorithm-change-that-will-push.html

How does Google judge “Mobile Friendliness”?

According to Google, a page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Google:
  • Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
  • Uses text that is readable without zooming
  • Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
  • Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

What this means specifically is that most of the following “responsive design” characteristics must automatically adjust when your website is viewed on a mobile device:

  1. Hierarchy (order) of things shown
  2. Navigation (selectors and menus)
  3. Fonts and Sizes
  4. Colors
  5. Layout (columns, etc.)
  6. Image Scaling and Size
  7. Padding (spacing left, right, and horizontally)
  8. Visibility: Hiding certain content

Ask yourself two simple questions:

  1. Does your website automatically adjust for correct display on a mobile phone? (Try it and see)
  2. Is Google going to classify your website (and list it in every one of their search results) as “mobile friendly”? (Test it here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/)

If you can’t answer yes to both these questions, you need to take action now.

How to get help

Dealing with someone you know and trust is the key factor to address these issues.  Many companies have lost touch with the people who originally developed their website, or for budgetary reasons have resisted needed website updates.  Now is the time to act.

If your current web developers know how to update your website for mobile friendliness, then they are the first people with whom you should talk.  Chances are, if they haven’t already warned you about the Google update, they may be out of touch.

There are lots of people who will try to sell you partial update services, but few of them understand the whole marketing picture. You need to deal with someone who does.

We have the experience to help you do this effectively, within your budget, and quickly.  You can call on us to do your update properly.  We also have fast alternatives for a new responsive website, if that is a better option for you.

How We Can Help

VisualME Announces New Mobile-Friendly Website

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VisualME is proud to announce the release of a new mobile-friendly website with a family of new capabilities and fully optimized for Google Search.

We’ve been upgrading our clients to mobile-friendly websites for over two years, and all new sites we’ve developed during that time are already mobile-friendly.  As is often the case, we’d neglected our own website, which had been developed over 10 years ago and gone through several revisions.

New website technologies have improved dramatically over the recent years, and we made the decision to redevelop our site, instead of upgrading, using all these new technologies, both for our own benefit, as well as to illustrate how effectively mobile technology can be blended with other innovative technologies and techniques to provide a truly “state of the art” web portal.

The new site contains examples of all the latest technologies, including:

  • Fully Responsive to show and operate properly on mobile phones, tablets, or standard web browsers with no page changes
  • Completely search engine optimized, to build the highest possible Google search rankings from day one
  • Search engine “click through” optimized to encourage click through activity from search results
  • Newsletter Subscriptions are integrated throughout the site, with non-intrusive pop-up form subscriptions and automatic new article notifications via subscription;
  • Completely integrated with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools
  • Completely integrated with Facebook for automatic postings and page referrals
  • Completely integrated with Google+ for Business for automatic postings and page referrals
  • Simple to maintain and enhance using a flexible and powerful content management system

What Does This Mean for You?

We developed our new website in four weeks, start to finish.  We used much of the content on our old site, but made sure to use all the appropriate new technology to make the website function properly as a lead generation tool.

Dealing with someone you know and trust is the key factor to address these issues for your website. If your current web support person has experience with “responsive design” and understands your website, they are the ones to call on.

There are, however, lots of people who will try to sell you partial update services, but few of them understand the whole marketing picture. Deal with someone who does.

We can help you develop a completely new website, within your budget, and quickly.

How We Can Help