Trends Q: How wide are the email templates resorts are using to deliver their messages?

We’ll get into a bit more in an upcoming Stash, but responsive email is a popular topic. And much of this interest stems from the scaling down that occurs when email apps match the width of a traditional template to the width of the screen – making some messages nearly unreadable. But that issue starts with the email template’s width. So, how wide are they?

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 250 resort email campaigns created so far this fall by 50 resorts across the country. We found the width of each template and grouped them by ranges below.

Though a few exist on the high and low end of the spectrum, the vast majority (83%) fall in the 600 – 750 pixel range. The largest group (43%) falls between 600 and 649 pixels in width.

What This Means
Most smartphone widths render at about 320-450 pixels, which means typical resort email templates could be scaled to anywhere between 40-75% of their original size. In other words, a 650 pixel template with 12px body text could read like 6px text on a smartphone.

Responsive emails are gaining popularity but they remain far from reliable for most resorts. Instead of responsive, email marketers often solve this issue with simple tweaks (which we’ll cover more in-depth later) like narrowing the width and/or increasing the font size of their templates.

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