Gmail and Today’s Popular Email Clients

With the plethora of email clients out there, marketers have to account for a lot of variables when creating their emails. And we’ve spent years chronicling our issues with coding and designing emails in Microsoft and Gmail. On more than one occasion, we’ve successfully anticipated changes to how these email clients read and support email designs.

But most email marketers today aren’t coding their own emails from scratch.

Thankfully, modern email design tools like Campaign Monitor take much of the guesswork out of crafting a beautiful and function email and you can know how your email will render before you ever push send.

Even so, it’s still important to know where your subscribers are reading their emails in order to maximize how many of your emails are landing in the right inboxes and how they look and perform when they get there.

So what are the most popular email clients out there and how do we know which ones your subscribers are using?

The top ten email clients (calculated from 946 million opens) are as follows:

Source: Email Client Market Share

Fine print: This leaderboard of the most popular webmail, desktop, and mobile email clients is compiled from data collected worldwide by Litmus Email Analytics, and displays up-to-date figures for the top 10 email clients as of November 2018.

Since determining the client in which an email is opened requires images to be displayed, the data for some email clients and mobile devices might be over- or under-represented due to automatic image blocking.

As you can see from this data, Apple Mail and Gmail lead other email clients by a longshot. In fact, Gmail just announced they have surpassed 1.5 billion users on their platform.

This means that you should keep Apple Mail and Gmail in mind when you’re designing your emails in order to provide a seamless experience for your subscribers and simplify the design process for your marketing team, especially if that team is just one person.

Which email clients are your subscribers using?

Each time a subscriber opens an email sent with Campaign Monitor, we keep track of which email client they’re using. You can see this in the Reporting section of your account under Email Client Usage.

Here’s an example:

In the example above, understanding that the majority of subscribers are viewing the email in Gmail and on iPhones will help you optimize your email design for the most opens and click-through rates on mobile devices.

For instance, knowing your specific users’ email clients will help you choose the best length for your email subject lines: You’ll want your subject line to be between 41 characters (the optimal number for portrait view on an iPhone) to 70 characters for Gmail.

Familiarizing yourself with today’s top email clients allows you to learn the limits of each and design your next email with these limitations in mind; this means no more worrying about images not displaying, subject lines getting cut off, or spam filter surprises.

Instead, you can feel in control of your email marketing campaigns.

Together, Apple Mail and Gmail make up 55% of the email client market share.

It’s no surprise that as mobile devices grow increasingly entrenched in our everyday lives, email, too, has seen an uptick in mobile usage. More people check their email using mobile devices than ever before, and you can expect those numbers to continue rising.

Source: Litmus

As the data shows, mobile accounts for the majority of opens in today’s email marketing. Thus, if you want to maximize the potential of your email marketing campaigns, you need to be optimizing for mobile every single time.

In fact, studies show that a majority of users will simply delete an email if it doesn’t render well.

When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to design for the small screen first. While a simplified and streamlined mobile email will also look beautiful and perform well on a desktop or webmail application, the same can’t be said for emails designed first and foremost for desktop viewing.

Designing for mobile

When you design for mobile, there are a few easy guidelines to keep in mind that won’t require too much of a shift in your email design, especially if you’re already following email design best practices.

In fact, optimizing for mobile is easy.

When optimizing for mobile, design your emails in a single column to avoid making your subscribers pinch and zoom in order to find the information they’re looking for. After all, in today’s marketing landscape, you can assume your subscribers won’t go looking for anything. Instead, they’ll simply delete an email that isn’t easy to scroll and digest at a glance.

Likewise, your calls-to-action should be large and tappable. Apple suggests making any buttons at least 44 pixels: the approximate size of a human fingertip. Again, everyone knows how frustrating it is when you can’t quite tap the link you’re trying to follow. By making your CTAs bold, you ensure your subscribers won’t have anything impeding their ability to follow through on your email.

Speaking of bold, feature graphics and images that are big and bold. Bold images are much easier to see at a glance. Remember, your subscribers are on the go and every bit of your message should be understandable with even the quickest of glances.

When optimizing for mobile, simplicity is the name of the game: You don’t want to overwhelm your subscribers or make them pinch and zoom in order to see and access your emails.

Because you can be sure that if your email isn’t easy to view and read on a smartphone, it won’t get a second chance to impress. Instead, emails that render poorly on mobile will be ignored, deleted, or even worse, marked as spam.

When optimizing for mobile, simplicity is the name of the game.

Now that you know the most popular email clients, you can plan and optimize your emails accordingly. Expect to see a boost in opens, click-throughs, and even in revenue after your next send.

The whole reason email is successful as a marketing channel is because it’s a direct line to your subscribers, and they’ve asked to hear from you. This makes converting easy for your most loyal customers and fans. By optimizing your emails specifically for their email client, you’re removing one more barrier that might stop them from converting.

Optimizing your emails for the various popular email clients has the power to improve your results and drive in even more revenue, giving you the best results from a campaign you’ve seen yet. Though it might seem like more effort up front, the increase in returns will make the few extra minutes you spend on an email campaign well worth it.

Be sure that you always test your emails before you push send in order to feel confident your campaigns will perform and receive maximum attention from your subscribers. Then, regardless of which email clients your subscribers use, your email marketing campaigns will yield the kind of results you’ve heard other marketers rave about.

Your email marketing campaigns can yield the kind of results marketers rave about.