Seven Recommendations as we approach the Point
How do you receive your email? If you’re like me, you probably access it through whatever device is the closest. At work or home, I’ll access email through my desktop or laptop, but more often than not, I’ll access my email from my iPhone.
Recent studies suggest I’m not alone. A new mobile email study by Knotice revealed that within the first six months of 2012, 36% of all emails sent across all industries were opened on a mobile device – a 32% increase over the last half of 2011.
Email open rate stats from Litmus uncovered that the iPhone has become the number one email client representing 20% of the overall email opens in 2012. This surpasses Microsoft Outlook, which represents 18%.
As mobile email usage continues to grow, industry experts predict that emails opened on a mobile device will exceed 50% for most companies within the next year. Knotice and others refer to this as the “mobile tipping point,” and advise email and mobile marketers to begin planning for this point when mobile users are the majority.
Mobile Email Marketing Recommendations
Review your mobile email stats. Understand how many people are opening, reading and clicking through your emails from a mobile device. Has your list reached the mobile tipping point?
- Test your emails on multiple mobile devices and within multiple email clients. How does it appear? Is it easy to read, navigate and click?
- Use mobile-friendly email templates or use responsive design for the device that recipient used the most often. Style your text, links, images and calls to action for a mobile user. Check out some mobile friendly templates from MailChimp and Campaign Monitor.
- Have a mobile-friendly landing page related to the content in the email.
- Don’t redirect all of the links to your mobile home page.
- Create a compelling subject line that invites users to open your email.
- If you can tie your email campaign to your CRM, pre-load forms with as much as possible including name, address, buying, shipping, and even payment method used in the past.
- Finally, always follow the standard email practices including having an unsubscribe link and a link to a web version of the email.
How do you receive your email? Do you have other recommendations for mobile email marketing? Comment below and let me know if you believe that email marketing is reaching its mobile tipping point.
One Comment
I open and read e-mails via two common methods; laptop(s) (work/home) and Android phone for nearly everywhere. I own eight e-mails accounts, for different purposes, that I can easily managed from my phone. However, from a browser I need to open separate screens to view them separately. I know of applications and methods to merge into one conjoined screen, while I just chose not.
What I typically find troubling with messages marketed to me, are the ones with graphics laid out like a web page. On a laptop, with a browser, these messages look inviting and professional. While viewing the same on mobile device, with my settings, is a total turn-off. What I typically view is empty boxes where image placeholder icons take on the clue that no images are loaded. What I feel mobile e-mail marketers need to do, is reduce all the extra navigational links and bars, side bars and underwriting disclosure. This content is all likely from their webpage, and I can view that when I click through the message. Mean while, I advise that marketers get to the content of the message, and what is it that you’re pitching.
I am not Malcolm Gladwell, however the tipping point for email marketing is still very much in need to some evolutional cycles of development to be effective. What’s to say that iPhone or even Apple will be around five years from now? New technologies will always be on the horizon, with need to shift to that paradigm. In my option, the meaning of e-mail marketing is synonymous to spamming for many and many people flag messages as just that. Just keep keeping up the on what’s next, or get left behind.