For the big newspapers, fully half of their readership is electronic:

Substantial percentages of the regular readers of leading newspapers now read them digitally. Currently, 55% of regular New York Times readers say they read the paper mostly on a computer or mobile device, as do 48% of regular USA Today and 44% of Wall Street Journal readers.

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Brands that do not have a mobile site feed competitors clients, with half admitting they will buy from the company less often if the Web site isn’t mobile friendly. The study found consumers are five times more likely to abandon a task. Some 61% of users said they move on to another site if they don’t quickly find what they need, and 79% that don’t like the unfriendly mobile site go back and search for another. About 66% of consumers find mobile sites through a search engine.

¶

If I give up reading the promotional e-mail you sent me because I have to squint to make out what it says on my phone, that’s a problem.

If I abandon your website because I have to keep zooming in and out on my phone to navigate, that’s a problem.

But these aren’t my problems: they’re yours.

Every e-mail and web page you create must be optimized to work on whatever device your users happen to be using. That means you need copy and designs that are fully usable both on desktop computers and, without pinching and zooming, on mobile devices like iPhone or Android phones. Sure, modern phones can display just about any page you throw at them. But that’s not enough.

Below are some examples to visually demonstrate what I mean.

Send e-mails to people, not to their desktop computers

If you’re trying to reach me–or any customer–by e-mail, you had better be sure I can read it wherever I am. Don’t design it to work only on my desktop computer.

Here’s an example from Zipcar that I couldn’t read on my iPhone:

The font in this message is very small and hard to read, except for the “last chance” graphic and the “tick tock” headline.

So why doesn’t it work? Because this message has a fixed-width design, a mobile device like the iPhone will aim to fit the entire width of the document on the screen, scaling down images and text to fit. It’s formally functional on a mobile device in that it renders faithfully to the original, but that’s actually the problem. The original is designed for someone with 540px or more of available horizontal screen real estate, but iPhones and Androids are in practice far narrower (iPhones are, for practical purposes, 320px wide). An e-mail designed this way puts the design before effective communication.

Compare that message to this one:

In this case, we used a responsive, flexible-width design to ensure the message is legible on all devices. We also stripped out most images and formatting, so it even works nicely on older Blackberries, while in Outlook or Gmail it renders as a normal e-mail might.

Design web pages that work on any device

The same rule applies to web pages. Consider ESPN​.com, rendered in desktop format on an iPhone:

I know, right? It’s fully functional in the sense that it can be operated on an iPhone. But good luck finding what you want, clicking the right item, etc. There’s something about the Texas Rangers, but that’s about all I can read on the site.

To their credit, ESPN automatically sends mobile users to their mobile-optimized version, with text that’s legible, buttons intended for tapping with a finger rather than clicking with a mouse, and so forth:

Which version would you rather use on your phone?

Don’t ignore 12 percent of your customers

Mobile is something online marketers have to get right. Growing portions of web traffic–nearly 12 percent by one count, and certainly higher for some audiences–is driven by people using mobile browsers. You lose a lot when you send people messages they can’t use and promote sites they can’t read.

For a quick introduction to this topic, Smashing Magazine has a whole section on responsive web design, including this article on responsive e-mail templates. These articles on design patterns for mobile are also helpful.

What have you done to optimize your online marketing for mobile users? Tell me in the comments or at @nathanielward.

I got a coupon in the mail from Chipotle the other day. At the bottom was this fine print:

Offer valid only at participating locations, which in this case means all locations. Not to be combined with any other offers or somehow cleverly duplicated. Limit one card per visit. Please present this card to the cashier, but don’t be surprised when they keep it. Cash value ¹⁄₁₀₀^th of one cent, which is pretty much nothing. This is the fine print, why are you still reading this? Really, this is getting silly, go eat. © 2012 Chipotle Mexican Grill.

Someone clearly wanted to make sure even this normally dry language was fun and casual, as if a human being were explaining it to me, not a lawyer or a marketer.

In truth, every part of what you send to your customers should be written as if it’s from one human to another. Every detail matters, and it catches your customers’ attention when you break from the routine language. Think about how compelling the Southwest safety announcements are!

Have you seen other examples of companies communicating with their customers in unexpectedly human ways? Tell me in the comments.

Google has released a fascinating new study about how people use their various screens–televisions, phones, tablets, desktops, and so forth–throughout the day.

Ingrid Lunden summarizes the study at TechCrunch:

But, while smartphones may have the shortest sessions be used the least overall, they are the most-used when it comes to on-boarding to a digital experience — or sequential device usage, as Google calls it. The research found that a majority of online tasks get initiated on a smartphone while being continued on another device — perhaps with a larger screen for easier use.

Two key lessons from this:

1. Optimize your content for whichever device your customers might be using.
2. Go multi-channel: your customers see several screens daily. Make sure you’re visible on as many as possible.

(Via The Agitator.)

Tell me in the comments: What else can we draw from the Google report?