By Rieva Lesonsky
Email marketing is still one of the most effective tools for businesses of all sizes. But if you use email marketing for your small business, there’s something you should know: Today, more than one in five email marketing messages is opened on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet, reports a new study by digital marketing company Knotice, reported in Internet Retailer.
Knotice studied 6.5 million retail marketing emails for the first half of 2011 and found that 20.07 percent were opened on a mobile device—up substantially from 13.36 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. With the holiday shopping season increasingly “going mobile,” I’m guessing this quarter’s numbers will be up substantially from just a few months ago. In addition to opening the emails, users clicked on links in 11 percent of them.
What are the most popular devices for opening emails? Of all emails Knotice studied, 12.78 percent were opened on an iPhone, 3.92 percent on an iPad, 3.15 percent on an Android device, 0.22 percent on the now-defunct HP webOS (formerly Palm), 0.05 percent on a device running one of the Windows mobile operating systems, 0.01 percent on a BlackBerry and 0.11 percent on “other.”
What does this mean to you? If you’re sending emails as part of your marketing, you need to assume your recipients will be viewing them on a mobile device at least some of the time. Depending on your audience—if they’re teens, young adults, early tech adopters or others who are more likely than average to rely on mobile devices, that percentage is likely to increase.
So you need to be optimizing your emails for mobile viewing if you want customers to engage with them and take action. While the first step to optimization is tailoring how an email looks on a smaller screen, Knotice’s report says it’s just as important to consider what users do next after clicking on the email’s links.
“Marketers need to be thoughtful about how the message is rendered, but more importantly, how the user can take action in the most convenient way possible,” Knotice’s report states, urging marketers to optimize not only the email, but also the “post-click experience.” That might mean clicking through to a mobile-optimized site; tapping on a phone number to call a customer service representative; or providing their email address to have a shopping cart, wish list, product information or follow-up reminder sent to them so they can complete the action at a more convenient time. Taking users to a Web page that is too cluttered, hard to view or has too many choices for the smaller screen can be worse than not engaging them at all.
Image by Flickr user Annie Mole (Creative Commons)
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