If you’ve discovered that your mobile phone is a great way to tackle a load of emails quickly, you’re not alone. “People use their phone to screen email a lot.” explains Cindy Krum, author of “Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are” and founder and CEO of mobile marketing consultancy MobileMoxie.

As the digital world moves ever more toward mobile platforms and devices, marketers can make sure that their message gets through.

“You have to start by having a really strong presence before the email’s even opened,” says Krum.  The following email marketing mobile tips can help maximize your email’s impact so messages are more likely to be read and clicked on small screens.

Track how many clicks come from mobile users

Figuring out exactly how many of your recipients are opening your emails on mobile devices is tough. However, tracking the portion of your audience that clicks a link on a device versus a laptop or desktop is relatively easy via Google Analytics, which is free.

Krum recommends setting up different mobile landing pages that correspond to the regular desktop pages. “You just set up a script on desktop landing pages to recognize whether someone is on a mobile phone, and send them to the mobile version of the landing page,” she explains. “This is something people do a lot on websites but forget to do with email.”

Next, you’ll look at your Google Analytics dashboard to see which percentage of traffic was redirected from the desktop page to the mobile page.

“Definitely some industries will skew more towards mobile than others, but most industries right now do have people checking and clicking through on emails on their phone,” Krum says. If there’s very low or no mobile traffic, it’s possible that tracking is set up improperly.

The “from” line

Your email  ‘from’ line is critical on mobile, says Krum, and appears larger than the subject line on some phones, so make sure it’s compelling.

“If you have a bad ‘from’ line and you actually forget to change it and it just says ‘mail’,” then it’s not optimized and it’s not going to draw as many opens from the phone,” Krum explains.

Email previews

Since many phones provide a kind of preview of email messages, says Krum, “What’s really important for mobile is the first bit of text on the email,”or preheader, as that first line is called. The first line of text gets pulled into the subject line for a lot email programs, and that’s basically what you preview on a phone.

Plenty of businesses lead their emails with something like “Having problems reading this email?” or “Reading this on mobile?” Instead, says Krum, make sure that you have a strong preheader that reinforces your subject line and entices people to open emails.

Design is still key

Email design is very important on mobile platforms. One mistake Krum notices is people treating email design just as they would website design and using too many columns in their layouts. “They try to cram three to four different columns of products in one email,” she says. “It looks okay on desktop, but not great, and it looks even worse on a mobile phone.” Instead, try to keep your emails to one or two columns.

Another common error that you can easily avoid is putting all your calls to action in the form of images. “People who are on the subway and have very little connectivity aren’t downloading images, so they won’t find your email compelling, and that’s a prime time for people to sit and delete emails. So if your offer or your awesomeness is all locked up in an image, they might miss it.”

Finding that balance isn’t always easy—buttons make compelling calls to action on a small screen—but following these simple principles and tracking what works on analytics can help you maximize your mobile impact in no time.

This post contributed by guest author, Yael Grauer. Grauer is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer and editor. Find her online at Yaelwrites.com.

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© 2014, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.