You might be wondering — what the heck is “mobile-responsive” anyway?
Well, a mobile-responsive theme is the latest evolution in creating sites that look great across all kinds of devices — including the mobile phones and tablets that are becoming some of the most common ways our readers see our sites.
Mobile-responsive design allows a site to control how it looks across these platforms. It seamlessly adapts, whether the user is seeing your site on a phone or a tablet, so your users have a great experience no matter what device they’re using.
Genesis is moving toward making all of our existing themes mobile-responsive. And we’ve coded Generate so it’s mobile-responsive right out of the box.
What that means for your site
As we’ve talked about before, email marketing is mobile marketing, now that so many people check mail on their mobile devices.
First, Generate looks great wherever your reader views it — whether that’s a computer, a phone, or a tablet.
Second, unlike some of the plugins that exist to make mobile-friendly versions of sites, the key conversion elements (in other words, the sign-up boxes that let readers join your list) are still there no matter how readers view your site.
Some plugins just strip out your site’s sidebars — which is where most sites put that valuable opt-in box. So mobile readers never get the opportunity to sign up for email and make a deeper connection. Generate sites don’t have that problem.
And finally, if you like, you can use the “tease and click” method to send your email readers to great-looking pages.
What’s tease-and-click?
It sounds a bit racy, but tease-and-click is just delivering an interesting, compelling teaser paragraph in the email itself, with a link back to a page on your site that offers the full content.
Why do this, instead of delivering all of the content right in the email message?
Well, you may have noticed yourself that it’s hard to read long email messages. We expect email to be brief and to the point. (I know, someone really needs to tell your boss that.)
In fact, usability studies have shown that readers have a longer attention span for web pages than they do for email messages. And sometimes you need a little more content when you’re trying to persuade.
Creating a site page for your full message allows you to use formatting and sub-heads that are optimized for longer articles. You can also make great use of images, which many readers don’t see at all in email.
And finally, you don’t have to worry as much about the wording of your email. You don’t want to have to water your content down just because a spam filter doesn’t like a certain term or word. (And yes, this happens even if you don’t write about Rolexes and pharmaceuticals!)
Now you don’t have to use tease-and-click for your email — there are plenty of excellent email marketers who put their entire message into the email itself. But if you do use it, with Generate you can be confident that you’re sending readers to great-looking pages.
