Your reader may well be on the phone

This is not your customer.

I increasingly use my smart phone for email and for reading as well. This means that if your email or website don't recognize my phone and adjust, I'm likely to give up on you,

A study by Litmus Labs shows 42 percent of the email client market share is found on a mobile platform, and between October 2010 and October 2012, the number of people who checked email on a mobile device increased by 300 percent.

Michael Burns, whose specialty is B2B PR and marketing communications, suggests that we:

• Keep it short, sweet and pertinent.
• From: If readers aren’t interested in who it’s from, it won’t be read. 73 percent of readers click “Report Spam” based only on who sent the email.
• Subject: Keep the subject line at 35 characters or less.
• Viewport: The most important information should be at the top. Use bullets, borders or background colors to encourage readers to scroll down.
• Scrolling view: After reading the full message, make answering the call to action easy and obvious.
• Make interactive elements large enough to easily tap.
• Align links and buttons to the center or left for easy use.
• Separate links so readers don’t accidentally tap more than one at a time.
• Never say “Click Here” because mobile users tap.
• Use fluid grids, fluid images and media queries to allow smart messages to sense the type of device and the right display.
• Optimize the layout and graphics for a mobile device.
• Stick to a single column and large text.

A laptop is easier than a desktop, a tablet is easier than a laptop, and a phone is the easiest of all. That's where they are today.