Google Inc.’s email service Gmail will soon support responsive design, the search giant announced this week.

Responsive design allows an email message to automatically format to the screen of the device a consumer uses to read an email. The update will allow email developers to use what are known as cascading style sheet (CSS) media queries when coding the email, which make it easy to change styles based on the characteristics of the device rendering the email content, including the display type, width, height, orientation and resolution, Google says. Retailers in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 1000 receive an average of 2.09% of their web traffic from email, according to Top500Guide.com data.

“This is just one part of an overall effort to expand CSS support in Gmail and to give email designers more control over how their messages are rendered,” Google says in its official app developer blog.

On average, 55% of emails are opened on a mobile device in 2016, according to email services firm Litmus. So Gmail helping designers more easily format messages for small screens is an important update, says Aaron Pearson, a product manager at email service provider Listrak.

“If your emails are optimized for mobile today, regardless of the responsive method they are built with, Gmail’s update will finally support the hard work you invested in developing your template,” Pearson says.

60% of marketers already use responsive format for transactional emails, according to Litmus’s 2016 State of Email Design that surveyed 674 marketers. However, when a consumer opened one of those emails in Gmail on a mobile device, it wouldn’t necessarily format properly.

“Without support for responsive design, opening an email in the Gmail app was presenting a really poor experience for readers,” Pearson says. “Usually the email would either be scaled down and difficult to read and engage with, or it would be broken by Gmail’s attempt to reformat the message.”

Email developers can create work-arounds to ensure a marketing message opened in Gmail would format properly, however, those solutions were time consuming and difficult, Pearson says. Previously, Gmail stripped out CSS styles in the head of the email, known as head style sheets, that provided coding for the entire email. And so email developers had to code each element of the email in the coding line, which led to large file sizes and redundant coding, Pearson says.

“[The update] could mean significantly easier-to-code email and especially much quicker to build and edit,” Pearson says. “Other major inboxes already support head stylesheets, but Gmail was the final holdout.”

Now, email developers will not have to code Gmail specific work arounds, says Chad White research director at Litmus.