The past few years have seen a big impact of mobile platforms on the eCommerce market. While mobile sites have been the focus for both B2B and B2C businesses, mobile email is on the rise as well. According to Experian’s Quarterly Email Benchmark Report from Q3 2014, 53% of total email opens occurred on a mobile platform in Q3 2014. How can your eCommerce site keep up with the growing popularity of mobile activity?
With the release of Magento Community 1.9 and Enterprise 1.14 came the addition of responsive email templates. The new editions of Magento have standardized transactional emails to be responsive so that they are optimized for the platform on which they are opened. There are dozens of different kinds of transactional emails, including new orders or shipments, forgotten passwords, or new account confirmation. They are essentially any kind of email that is sent from within Magento to a shopper of a Magento store. The full list of transactional emails includes:
| - Contact Form | - New Account Confirmation Key |
| - Credit Memo Update | - New Account Confirmed |
| - Credit Memo Update for Guest | - Newsletter Subscription Confirmation |
| - Forgot Admin Password | - Newsletter Subscription Success |
| - Forgot Password | - Newsletter Unsubscribe Success |
| - Gift Registry Sharing | - Order Update |
| - Gift Registry Update | - Order Update for Guest |
| - Invoice Update | - RMA Admin Comments |
| - Invoice Update for Guest | - RMA Admin Comments for Guest |
| - New Credit Memo | - Remind Password |
| - New Credit Memo for Guest | - Rewards Points Balance Update |
| - New Order | - Rewards Points Expiry Warning |
| - New Order for Guest | - Send Product to a Friend |
| - New RMA | - Share Wish List |
| - New RMA for Guest | - Shipment Update |
| - New Shipment | - Shipment Update for Guest |
| - New Shipment for Guest | - Store Credit Update |
| - New Account |
Before this release, each email required an edited email template. For example, if you were working with a new order email, you would load the original new order template and then change the coding to be CSS and HTML responsive. You would then have to go into the settings and make sure that the store was using the newly created email template, as opposed to the original. With the new Magento release, however, this is all out-of-the-box functionality.
This feature optimizes emails to allow you to use one email template for all devices. When an email is sent, a media query will run that asks what the window or screen size is and what sort of pixel ratio is needed. Based on the size and pixel range, it will apply a designated CSS for that size screen, making the email accessible and easy to read.
For those members of the development team who were spending valuable time reformatting emails to fit different displays, this update is a huge benefit.
