With mobile email readership exploding, marketers are increasingly looking for advice on how to optimize their communications for the small screen.  Unfortunately, it can be difficult to sort fact from fiction with the gluttony of information out there. Here are the top 5 myths—and realities—of mobile email marketing.

Myth 1 – Include a TEXT part, that’s what your readers will see!

Yes, absolutely include a text part if you’re sending a true multi-part mime, but your mobile readers will not see a text part—they will see the HTML part rendered in a variety of ways. If you were to examine the rendering capabilities of the top mobile devices over the last 2 years or so, you’d see vast differences. For those devices that seem to render text-only guess again, that’s not text you’re looking at—it’s the HTML part of a message but with the HTML tags stripped out. Your links will be rendered in most cases, but certain platforms won’t render a link unless it’s a full URL as opposed to hyperlinked text.

Myth 2 – Include a pre-header.

Pre-headers today seem to run the gamut from add to address book, to tertiary offers, to links to mobile versions. What started as the “add to address book” line became ubiquitous when ISPs began to turn images off; being in someone’s address book effectively turns those images back on. But a downside to a pre-header is that it pushes the primary call to action down the page, along with the branding, which in a graphic enabled mobile email client is precious space at the top of the message on a screen no bigger than 320x240 at most. Additionally if your mobile phone’s email client strips HTML and you’ve hyperlinked words in a preheader such as: Can’t see this on your mobile phone, click here, the “here” in your pre-header is worthless text and will not accomplish the task you intended.

Myth 3 – Link to a mobile version of the email

So you thought that since mobile email clients aren’t perfect, a mobile web browser is? Think again. Mobile web browsing is as fraught with peril as mobile email. The industry leading handset, with arguably the best user experience, the iPhone, lacks support for Flash. Mobile web browsers can take long times to download an entire web page and how they will render that page is anyone’s guess as they are essentially stripped down versions of the full browser and may not support complicated CSS layouts.

Myth 4 – Mail a mobile version!

Oh yeah, that’s right, there’s a one size fits all mobile version of email that will span the radically different native email programs of the iPhone, Blackberry(s), Palm(s), Symbian(s) and other leading handset makers. In addition to the rendering differences among the aforementioned let’s face the facts: You don’t get to choose where your customer reads their email—they do. Just because you sent joe@yahoo.com an email doesn’t mean he’s going to read it on his mobile phone or using his Yahoo webmail—he may pop it into his Outlook Express. The point is, it’s his choice where he reads it! The possibilities are limitless and marketers should optimize for cross channel efficiency by keeping communications light (as close to 20kb as possible), confined to a single column layout and omitting as many complex layout variables as possible.

Myth 5 – Just press send!

That’s right, now that you chopped the first four heads off the hydra you’re good to go and you simply hit the send button and hope for the best. Wrong! In an increasingly complex, multi-platform, “3.0” digital communication environment, quality assurance testing has never been so important. Leverage tools which allow you to see what your email will look like before sending it to ensure that you achieved optimal rendering across the numerous mobile, web and desktop email clients. Remember, your clients are using all of them. The question for you is this: are you designing your emails to succeed with today’s realities in mind, or are you going to let your missives linger in a web of mythology?

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