One Easy Way to Make Your Emails More Readable
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Writing at the Retail Email blog, Chad White offers some interesting facts about the Baby-Boomer generation. First, by 2015, nearly half of the US population will be age 50 or older (AARP). Second, Boomers currently control over 80% of personal financial assets and account for more than 50% of the country's discretionary spending power (ThirdAge).
According to White, marketers have failed to address a simple issue critical to continued patronage from this growing, affluent audience: readable font sizes. "[They] regularly use small text on their websites and in their emails and other marketing materials," he says, "creating unnecessary legibility issues for some of their most valuable customers."
With this in mind, he has created the acronym-friendly Boomer Legibility Initiative for a New Decade (BLIND). Its mission? To increase font size by one point in 2010, by another in 2015 and by one more in 2020.
"Increasing font sizes is also becoming vital as more email and websites are viewed on mobile devices, which often scale content down, making text even harder to read," he notes at the initiative's LinkedIn page, where he also recommends limiting the use of:
- Reverse type, with a lighter text on a darker background.
- Low-contrast pages, with little difference between colors used for text and background.
- Background images with a text overlay.
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Comments
Anyone ever seen the type-size controls on their email app, or browser?
Or heard of Readability?
Now pill bottles, that's another story entirely! But Big Pharma spends too much of their money on buying legislators.... Boomers, yeah, just keep buying your BP meds....
I think its an interesting initiative but I'm failing to see the point to be quite honest. Currently mobile email/mobile web surfing is still anywhere from 1% to 10% of all email/web consumption and varies greatly from industry to industry. We all agree that mobile is the next frontier fueled by social media, along with LBS we are assured of a brave new world of immediate interaction with end users on an individual basis.
That being said, if it's xmas I expect boomers to be sitting at their PCs/laptops ordering gifst for grand kids the world over not stomping through a bistro with a mobile phone in hand trying to accomplish the same task. I don't believe that boomers make up a significant enough portion of the mobile email ecosphere to mandate a standard/font initiative.
Let's think about this another way: if you're selling something that appeals to the older set, medical supplies, life insurance etc. then chances are you have a site that is already optimized for the senior set with black on white text, big smiling faces and clearly marked links. If you're selling Diesel Jeans or Juicy Couture then your audience expects your site to meet the latest MTV design aesthetics in order to compete for flea like attention spans. I think the product and audience should drive the design standard. Don't assume that Boomers really care about what's happening with Britney Spears. Rather if you can demonstrate that your customers are an older set then you should absolutely code your site for increased readability at a lower resolution/higher font size.
Assume that they need 12pt and also enable their choice of font style and size as set in their browsers. Remember that contrast is very important. Gray may be elegant, but the elderly find it hard to read. ===gm===