So you’ve decided to step up your email marketing campaign, huh? Maybe you’ve had an existing email campaign going on and you’re trying to find ways to boost conversion. There are a lot of things to consider when starting, maintaining, or changing an email marketing campaign.

I bet a lot of folks, myself included, forget one major consideration that can have a huge impact on the successfulness of email marketing: mobile users.

As a new MarketingSherpa study revealed, it’s possible that more than 60% of the people making decisions at companies these days are reading your email on a Blackberry or similar mobile device. That means your marketing message is getting scrambled, hacked, and beat to death 6 times out of every 10.

That’s bad news.

But, luckily, MarketingSherpa has provided some techniques and tips on making your email marketing more Blackberry compatible:

1. Find a Blackberry and look at your email messages personally. What do they look like? What’s working… what’s broken?
2. Send email messages in text-only or multipart MIME. Text-only messages can be read by anyone. Multipart MIME messages contain both an HTML version (for viewing on a PC) and a text-only version (perfect for a mobile device). But you still have to be careful with MIME - some mobile email clients will still try to display the HTML version.
3. Formatting is critical! Some suggestions include:
   • 8 pt font (it’s readable but small enough for mobile use)
   • Keep space constraints in min (subject lines should be short and “actiony”)
   • The first screen (which includes the subject) should be attention grabbing. Mobile users aren’t reading long emails - they’re glancing. That means you’ve got about 100 characters to turn that browser into a reader.
   • Include links as full addresses (www.address.com) instead of linking to anchor text
   • Put images lower in the message - PC users get the rich experience and mobile users get the information at the top of the message quickly.
4. Subject lines are as important as body text. Because this is often the only thing mobile users see, it must grab their attention long enough to make them open the message. But it also has to be short to work for mobile use. One contributor told MarketingSherpa their philosophy was “Be brief, be brilliant, and be gone!”
5. Ask your subscribers how they’re accessing your email. The degree to which you tailor your messages for mobile use can vary greatly depending on the demographics of your subscribers. If 5% of your subscribers are using mobile you’d probably approach a mobile version differently than if 50% were.
6. Create a Blackberry landing page and invite Blackberry users to click-through to it at the very beginning of the email message.

MarketingSherpa has also provided a ton of links to creative samples, Blackberry simulators (for testing your messages), studies on mobile user behavior, and more.