A recent blog featured in B2B Magazine online notes that the growth of smart phones and tablets is necessitating a hard look at email design. It predicts that one-size-fits-all layouts–which are actually designed for email reading panes–may soon be a thing of the past now that “responsive email design” is here.

Using CSS3 coding technique called “media queries,” you can now design your email to automatically re-format and re-size itself to optimize for whatever screen size your recipient is reading on. It can also hide non-essential email elements from the mobile reader, making the main call-to-action more easily found, and can even change various other elements of the email, including text size and color, background images and background color.

Responsive email design seems like a big step in improved user experience to us, but it’s too new to have a proven track record of ROI. We’re going to monitor the situation closely. For the price of some additional coding and design time, email performance may make some serious jumps forward. Stay tuned!