With the rise of new digital formats - smart phones being one important channel - how can you ensure that your email announcements and online newsletters are optimised across platforms, from computers to PDAs?

We feature here, 10 tips from Loren McDonald, vice-president of industry relations for Silverpop, an email service provider:

1. Preview pane.  Design for the preview pane and initial mobile screen. Use your most valuable real estate, the top 2-3 inches of your message, for your most important content.

• Move standing copy, such as “forward to a friend” or “add to the address book” requests, down below the fold. Consider moving “add to address book” copy to the bottom or administrative area of your emails—and focus on these efforts in the confirmation and welcome emails, where you can explain the delivery and rendering benefits in more detail.
• Put links to Web and mobile versions below the fold, after key information/calls to action. Alternatively, you can incorporate your call to action in the link to your Web or mobile version.

2. Alt text. Use descriptive alt text (HTML text that displays when images do not render) with all images, so the text will show in some email environments when images are blocked.

3. Width. Use fixed-width tables. This ensures that your email won’t expand when images are blocked. Also, make sure you specify image height and width.

4. Width. Keep emails to less than 600 pixels wide. This eliminates the need for users to scroll and ensures that your email won’t have ads overlaid on your content from email services such as Gmail.

5. Links. Use text links, not image links. Image-based links will create a mess in most mobile environments and will not render when images are blocked in a PC environment.

Spell out key URLs/links. Particularly if you have an international audience, you should spell out the full URL. Different countries use different operating systems for mobile devices, and some do not recognise embedded links.

6. Legibility. Design for horizontal scanning. Because most people use the horizontal preview panes, design the top (”above the fold”) section of your email without columns or tables and for easy left-to-right scrolling.

7. Mastheads. Eliminate image-based mastheads or move below the fold. These take up valuable real estate on all devices and will show up as blanks on PCs when images are blocked and as a long image path on many mobile devices.

With no images and extraneous HTML at the top, mobile users should be able to read the first part of your email easily.

8. No postcards. Eliminate postcard-style emails and use of very large images.

Hotmail/Live Mail may block postcard-style emails (those with a high image-to-text ratio). With the growing use of preview panes and blocked images, large images also make for a very poor rendering and user experience.

9. Searchable. Put key information in HTML text. This includes newsletter/company name, article titles, product names, calls to action, contact information, and URLs.

10. Tracking URLs. Consider not using long tracking URLs at the top of your emails. These long strings of code can take up most of the initial screen on many smartphones. While you lose link tracking, you gain subscriber usability.

For more information, please contact Manifesto.