Designing corporate communications with mobile email in mind

Mobile consumption of email is growing in popularity. However internal communicators should not rush into decisions that will impact the design of their corporate communications, such as email newsletters, without having insight into their audiences' needs. Decisions should be made based on employee data available - and also on review of campaign metrics and measurement in order to fully understand how employees are consuming their communications.

Use insight and measurement to make corporate communications design decisions.

Together these two pieces of business intelligence can help you make an informed decision about your mobile email strategy. Along with data held within the organization as to what segments of employees may need to access work communications remotely, thanks to the metrics available from your campaigns you’ll have insight into viewing and consumption patterns.

My advice is to first create an email corporate communications template that will be consumable on all devices / platforms. This puts IC teams in an excellent position to take the time to make decisions by using insight and measurement gained from their campaigns in order to decide what steps they want to take next in their template designs.

Some customers have already identified a segment of their audience that needs an optimised-for-mobile communication. It makes sense to design both a desktop email newsletter (compatible in all devices) along with a specially designed one-column mobile template.

ProBuild is one such company. They are one of the largest US suppliers of building materials to national builders, and have employees working remotely. ProBuild chose to design both a standard email newsletter template that could be consumed on any device, along with a one-column, easy-to-read mobile version. A link to the mobile edition is embedded at the top of the desktop edition - allowing every employee to make a choice based on how they are accessing the email when they are opening it. This means along with remote workers, office-based employees who may normally be in the office will also be able to select the mobile edition for quick consumption of the content if they are working remotely.

If you are a Newsweaver customer contact your account manager to discuss your corporate communications options and for further advice on how to optimise for a mobile audience.