For hoteliers, mobile is becoming an increasingly important medium for marketing. According to Revinate’s data, only 38% of emails sent by our customers were opened on desktops over the last 60 days. This trend cuts across industries. People are three times more likely to check email on a mobile device–meaning they’re three times more likely to see your offers on a mobile phone, especially an iPhone (iPhones get the most mobile traffic).

It goes beyond just opening emails. According to Google research, travelers feel comfortable researching, booking and planning the entire trip to a new destination with just a mobile phone. That includes 48% of US travelers, 45% of French travelers and 59% of Japanese travelers.

What does this mean? If you want to successfully market with email, you have to adopt a mobile-first mentality.

Here are some key considerations when creating emails for the mobile user:

Keep the subject line short

Your subject line is perhaps the most important part of your email. You want it to be something that’s both clear and enticing–something that will get your customers to open the email. After all, if they don’t open the email, they won’t see anything else you’ve done. Traditionally, experts suggested subject lines around 60 characters. Now that more people check their email on mobile, you may want to consider a subject line closer to 30 or 40 characters to ensure it displays correctly on phones. For example, the number of characters that will display in a subject line on an iPhone is 41 characters.

Don’t worry about cramming everything in the subject line either. You can take advantage of preheader text to provide more context if you feel this character length is too restrictive. In fact, emails with preheaders have a seven percent higher open rate.

Invest in responsive email templates

Responsive design is absolutely crucial for any email that you expect to be opened on mobile. If your email doesn’t look right, your recipients won’t bother to read it and your hard work will be wasted. If you’re a Revinate Marketing customer, good news: our library of templates are all optimized for mobile, so you don’t have to be a coding pro and create your own responsive template.

Make everything clickable

Another important aspect of optimizing for mobile is optimizing for fingers. Make sure that everything that should be clickable, like images and URLs, are clickable and properly linked. Broken links will give the wrong impression to your email readers. You don’t want to stack links (put multiple links too close together) or have too small a CTA (it can be hard to click). Don’t go overboard with the font size, but make sure the average thumb can easily find it and that when clicked it goes to the right location.

Keep content to a minimum

You copy needs to be snappy because mobile users spend much less time on each email than desktop readers. The average mobile user spends about three seconds with each email, so you need to make sure that you’re catching their interest right out of the gate. They also aren’t likely to linger in your email, so make sure that your offer is clear. Don’t add unnecessary content and always try for the most efficient use of text and images.

To market successfully, you need to meet people where they are. And these days, that means meeting them on mobile. These tips should help you get the most of your mobile email marketing. For a deeper dive into email marketing strategy, check out our Email Marketing Strategy Guide.