Giant Technology Trade Show CeBIT 2017 Embraces Mobile in Its Email Marketing

As much as digital marketing has changed, email still plays a key role in attendee acquisition.

We received more than 25 attendee-centric emails over the five-and-a-half month campaign for CeBIT 2017, which brought together 3,000 exhibitors with 200,000 attendees three weeks ago at the Hannover fairgrounds.

We liked this campaign, especially the mobile-optimized execution, so share 5 takeaways…

(1) Due to the use of responsive design, the emails automatically adjusted to fit the screen size of the device we were using.  In addition, the content rendered differently across different devices so, for example, we saw less images, shorter text, and different call-to-actions on an iPhone than a laptop.  An email design strategy which factors mobile is essential today when you consider that on average 54% of email opens happen on mobile, based on 17 billion email opens in 2016 analyzed by email testing and analytics company, Litmus.

(2) CeBIT employed a “snack-size” content strategy.  A consistent format of tight modules, composed of a compelling headline, short description and clear call-to-action, enabled you to quickly browse the emails for items of interest.  Hero sections at the top of the emails also made the lead content module more attention-grabbing.  While using text-light content is a good strategy for all emails, it is particularly valuable on mobile where people are on the move with less time to read your emails.

(3) All emails had preheaders, which reinforced rather than repeated the subject line.  Preheaders are one more tool to help you win the open, especially if they are well paired with subject lines.  Preheaders are also arguably more important on mobile.  There’s much more space allocated to preheader text than to the subject line in our iPhone inbox (iOS native Mail app), and iPhone was the top email client in 2016.  Of course, email clients are different so track your email client usage and optimize accordingly.

(4) Buttons or other large tappable areas were used for call-to-actions (CTAs) rather than standard text links.  Touch-friendly CTAs provide a better user experience and help mitigate the fat-finger effect on mobile.  One other point worth noting is that the CTA buttons in the lead content block of the email (the hero section) were coded in such a way that they displayed even when we had images turned off in our inbox.

(5) The show organizer delivered a seamless mobile experience.  When we engaged with CeBIT’s emails, we were taken to destination pages on the show website which rendered optimally for the device we were using.  The end-to-end execution is critical here.  Serving a traditional web page to someone who opens your email on a mobile device can be a real engagement killer. How mobile friendly is your show website?

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Posted on April 12, 2017