It’s hard to find a clear explanation of just how the growth of mobile email changes things for email marketers.
Partly because there are no simple answers to satisfy our need for…simple answers.
For a long time you could hear mobile phone number list experts saying you should simply add a link to a mobile-friendly version of your email at the top of your templates.
Which sounded easy until you actually tried to create a link that would work on all mobile devices.
Or tried to define exactly what a mobile-friendly version should look like.
What we do know is that the challenge is shifting. So after setting the scene last week, it’s time to explore the issues in more depth…
Previously, the big deal with mobile email was the poor way that most devices could handle HTML email: they made a mess of it. And with little common ground between different mobile devices, it was nigh on impossible to find nice design solutions.
Fortunately, the “do nothing about it” approach was not an unreasonable strategy. Why?
Mobile email was more or less limited to B2B. More importantly, people largely used mobile email to sort their email, responding to important, personal messages and saving the rest for back at the PC.
There simply weren’t enough people trying to read and interact with your emails to panic about the whole mobile email issue.
That admirable “head in the sand” approach is now looking a little tired, because the nature of mobile email has changed. For a start, there’s much more of it about than before.
For example, in their report of a survey of over 2,000 adults in the US and UK, e-Dialog noted that:
“…33 percent of consumers in the US and UK access email on their mobile devices in addition to their computers”
But there are three other important trends here that concern email marketers.
- Smartphones
The first is the growth of smartphones. Last week I gave you this collection of stats showing how smartphone sales were gathering pace.
Two quick stats from that collection: Gartner expect 500 million smartphones to sell in 2019, by which time Morgan Stanley expect smartphone sales to have outstripped PC sales.
You can find out who’s using smartphones on your own list with the help of email analytics tools (like MailboxIQ or Litmus).
- From Triage to Engagement
Smartphones are far better at handling HTML email and offer a much better overall email experience than traditional mobile phones. Indeed, they offer a much better online experience per se. As a result, mobile phone users can easily do things online that were largely unheard of a couple of years ago.
For example, analysts Gartner note:
“By 2011, over 85 percent of handsets shipped globally will include some form of browser. In mature markets, such as Western Europe and Japan, approximately 60 percent of handsets shipped will be smartphones with sophisticated browsing capability and the ability to render conventional HTML sites in some manner”
The same trend is impacting mobile email.
A survey conducted by smartFocus found that:
“Two years ago the mobile was almost entirely used to read, filter and delete unimportant emails, whereas now 30% of users are reading and replying to emails through their mobile.”
So we now have people owning and using devices that provide “good enough” support for them to start using email and websites in meaningful ways that were previously limited to netbooks, laptops and desktop PCs.