3 Ways to Optimize Email Presentations for Mobile Devices

It's time to stop looking at presentations as a collection of slides, but rather as a well-designed viewing experience across all devices.

Your sales and marketing teams have likely spent countless hours crafting the perfect sales presentations. They've gone through numerous rounds of design and edits, they've been vetted and okayed by stakeholders, and they've probably already driven some sales.

However, your killer sales presentation isn't truly done until you've ensured it looks just as stunning across every device your customers might use to view it. In other words, just because it looks great on a desktop or SmartBoard doesn't guarantee it will look equally good when viewed on a mobile device or tablet.

Mobile devices account for 60% of all read emails. This should come as no surprise, but we live in a mobile-first world. So it’s essential that your presentations create a good first impression when viewed across all devices. Plainly put, a poor mobile viewing experience leads to a loss in consumer engagement. In fact, a recent study shows that 52% of customers are less likely to engage with a company in the future because of a bad mobile experience.

Here are 3 things you should consider before emailing

Okay, great. You need to optimize your presentations for mobile viewing. But how do you know what needs optimizing in the first place? Here are three key factors that might prevent your prospects from engaging with your presentation on their phones.

1. Is my presentation attachment too large?

Attaching a document to an email is second nature. However, you need to pay close attention to the size of your attachments, especially if you’re using PowerPoint. Owing to the content within, presentation files can become very large, and most email providers don’t allow attachments larger than 25MB.

Further complicating matters, if you're requiring viewers to download a heavy attachment, it can deter them from viewing your presentation at all. It’s a burden on their storage space as well as their time. Some email clients may even flag it as a security concern.

2. Is my presentation legible on smaller devices?

Viewing desktop presentations littered with graphs, charts, and endless bullet points can be hard on a viewer’s eyes and make it more difficult to retain the information. It’s even worse on a screen that’s a fraction of the size.

Mobile browsers will scale down your presentation to the width of your recipient's screen format. In portrait mode, a 16×9 presentation will cover roughly one-third of the screen’s viewing area. In turn, this requires viewers to zoom and pan around a presentation. This might be fine for a presentation containing a few slides, but it will quickly become tedious and frustrating for presentations of considerable length and content.

3. Is it easy for a viewer to navigate my presentation?

Your goal should be to provide your viewer with content that’s relevant to them as quickly as possible and without hassle. Remember, presentation attachments opened on mobile devices lack the navigational components they'd have on desktops.

Without navigation, your viewer won't be able to find your content as quickly as you'd hope. Consequently, viewers are left to sift through multiple slides and sections to identify what’s relevant to their needs.

How do I ensure my presentation looks professional across multiple screen sizes?

The platform you’re using to distribute your presentations is going to dictate the viewing experience for your audience. Platforms like Powerpoint, Keynote, and Google Slides aren’t designed for mobile viewing experiences. These are traditional desktop presentation design and distribution platforms and just aren't built for a responsive viewing experience. In turn, they’re limited in their export functionality, allowing for only heavy, static formats such as PDFs.

We believe brands should look beyond these traditional platforms as a means for presentation distribution. Instead, you need to treat company presentations as web-based viewing experiences. We encourage you to think of your company sales presentations as you would your company website. This means creating a device-agnostic viewing experience to give users the ability to freely navigate to the content most relevant to their needs and interests.

Nuvue has its own proprietary technology that helps brands build mobile responsive presentations. And as much as we’d like you to use our technology, we can offer some other solutions:

•  Tap into your in-house development team or digital agency. Discuss the possibilities of making a web-based presentation. You could easily incorporate this into your current website and distribute the URL to your sales team who can then email it to prospects.
•  If you don’t have the internal resources, look into online website builders such as Squarespace or Wix. These template-based web platforms allow you to build pages in seconds.

These are both good short-term solutions and are more than appropriate for smaller enterprises. However, for larger organizations looking to provide a truly optimized sales experience, it's worth exploring a more sophisticated approach to presentation distribution.

So, before hitting the send button on that email with your company overview deck, make sure you're confident that recipients will have a viewing experience reflective of the brand you’re selling.