Responsive-aware emails use responsive design in the header, navigation bar and footer. Those areas tend to have the smallest text and the highest link densities on desktops. This method allows marketers to increase font sizes and spread out links so they can be easily and accurately tapped with a finger, drastically improving the subscriber experience.

Responsive design involves more work and coding, because you’re essentially creating two or more versions of the content to optimize it across screen sizes. So the other big benefit of focusing your responsive coding in the header, navigation bar and footer is that those elements tend not to change very often. That means you can incorporate that code into your template and reuse it over and over with minimal need to touch those between sends.

Mobile-aware design is then used for the primary and secondary message blocks — the portions that change for pretty much every email sent. Using responsive design for this content significantly increases production time, so sticking with mobile-aware is very efficient.