Goes without saying that we want all emails to render correctly across all devices. However, we may sometimes run into issues where an email client may not support certain elements, or layouts, within the email. This becomes apparent when opening a campaign on a mobile device, where the email client does not support mobile optimisation, therefore the campaign just looks the same as it does on a desktop. This happens because some email clients do not support media queries.

Media queries give you the ability to allow the content of your campaign, to adapt to the screen resolution of your device. This means that on a desktop view you can have a specific layout and style of your campaign, however on a mobile device, you can change the layout and style of your campaign to make it more user friendly for mobile users. The media queries contain stylings, (known as CSS), that are pulled through when the media query is true.

By the way, we have a very handy CSS support guide here, which specifies the full, partial or lack of support for a specific CSS component on a specific email client.

For example, with the below media query, when the screen resolution is 600px all the styles defined within the brackets will overwrite the current styles. 

@media screen and (min-device-width: 600px) {

     /* insert CSS code here */

}

Outlook was guilty of not supporting media queries, which meant that any campaigns opened on a mobile device using Outlook were not mobile optimised. However, Microsoft have recently announced that Outlook will be supporting media queries in early 2019 for Outlook web apps and Office 365. This will not only allow you to send out mobile responsive campaigns to recipients that use Outlook, but it will also enable you to build your campaign for different desktop screens, tablets and mobile devices ensuring they look their best, no matter what device the recipient is using.

More and more emails are being opened on smartphones and Business users send and receive on average 121 emails a day in 2014, and this is expected to grow to 140 emails a day by 2018. So, if you are not already mobile optimising your campaigns, now would be a good time to start learning how.

Get in touch at info@campaignmaster.co.uk to learn how to code your emails for all devices.