Depending on your design needs, you can build mailing templates in two different ways: as mobile-optimized templates or as responsive-design templates. Let’s look at the differences between these options.

Mobile-optimized templates

As their name suggests, mobile-optimized templates are designed to render correctly on mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets). However, the name is misleading because mobile-optimized templates also work extremely well on desktop devices.

Mobile-optimized templates are, essentially, static templates; their formatting will not change based on the viewing device.

EXAMPLE: A mobile-optimized template that contains one column of text will display that one column across all devices and email clients.

Responsive-design templates

Responsive-design templates will adapt the content to match the viewing environment’s screen size.

EXAMPLE: A responsive-design template that has a story layout with two columns of text will automatically rearrange to display as a single column on mobile devices.

By their nature, responsive-design templates are more complicated than mobile-optimized templates, and they generally require a design-savvy user to create. For example, to build a responsive template, you will need to select the HTML5 DOCTYPE and you will need to make modifications to the HTML Head Tags.

TIP: To learn more, see Understand Responsive Design.

WARNING: Responsive design does not work on all email systems. Some email clients will not support this function.