I was in Starbucks and on a table adjacent to what appeared to be a couple of grandmothers with their charges. I'd given up trying to write about free email templates as the noise was distracting. To make it worse there came the irritating buzz of a mobile phone.

It was a cue for grandmother one to take out her iPhone and have a quick chat with someone who was probably a parent of the little girl she was supervising given her comments to the child. The odd thing was that it did not appear odd.

Everyone is using smartphones or tablets. Their market penetration would appear to be all but total. The question arises whether or not you should modify your email templates to take this into consideration.

Given that statistics tend to suggest around half of emails are opened on desktops or laptops it would be nonsensical to tailor all your marketing emails for optimum viewing on a BlackBerry screen. On some, anything over 120 pixels width or with large pictures is difficult to read easily.

iPhones are a little better, going up to 320 pixels, but even they are best at single column emails. Whilst I have seen few grannies pulling out their iPads and placing them beside their cappuccinos, no one can doubt that after Christmas it might become the norm.

You should be considering ways of coping with the range of devices now able to display emails. The first thing to do is to discover the proportion of your subscribers using them and what percentage read their emails on them. You should consider asking them, perhaps by having tick boxes at the bottom of your marketing emails.

It is suggested that you should continue using free email marketing templates the way they were intended. However where you know that the reader will be viewing it on a BlackBerry then there is nothing stopping you, other than a few clicks of a mouse button, from modifying the layout to suit.

Everyone should be working on a strategy to cope with what is acknowledged as a substantial change to the way people are accessing their emails.