Email - What is "Responsive" email?

With a growing number of your email messages being opened on phones, it's important for your messages to accommodate webmail, desktop and mobile. Designers are increasingly using responsive email design to ensure emails look great everywhere.

What is "responsive" email design?

Responsive design uses fluid tables and images to make content adapt to different screen sizes. If your message is designed with a fixed width of 600px for the content and the image, it will look like this on a desktop:

If we view the message on a mobile client, it would look like this:

The fixed-width table and image prevent the message from shrinking down to fit on the smaller screen. Some mobile mail clients attempt to "magically" fix the problem by forcing the message to fit on the small screen:

We can see all of the image but the content uses a smaller font size and becomes very difficult to read - much less scan quickly.

With a responsive email design, the email is fluid. The image and the content area are adjusted to fit the screen, but the content's font size stays large and readable.

eAdventist's responsive email editor

The responsive email editor in eAdventist allows you to create messages that have 1, 2 or 3 columns when viewed on a desktop but fluidly change to 1 column when viewed on a phone. It includes a "Mobile view" that you can use to preview the change.