6 practical tips to improve response from emails read on mobile devices
With the current growth in use of mobile devices, from smartphones to iPads and a variety of tablets, mobile email design has become a vital consideration for 2014 if you want people to be able to read and respond to your email marketing campaigns
In fact, according to these Litmus mobile open statistics, 51% of email opens are on a mobile device, and some brands see upwards of 70% of their emails opened on a mobile, while 80% of people will delete an email if it doesn’t look good on their phone.
Yet even with all this growth in mobile email, 58% of email marketers are still not designing for it, and MarketingSherpa reports that 31% of marketers don’t even know their mobile email open rate.
Design your email marketing for a mobile device
So…
Missing a moving target – The disparity between mobile device opens and clicks, and what you can do about it
Despite the increase in number of mobile devices, only half of marketers are designing email with mobile in mind, which shows that there is a massive disconnect between a bespoke mobile design and experience that people should be receiving versus the one which they are actually getting.
In our latest research we completed detailed analysis of over 35,000 emails sent by over 119 companies in 23 sectors. This post contains an overview of the insight we gained and how you can succeed in getting your campaigns opened on the desktop, smartphone and tablet. A key finding was that across different sectors smartphone and tablet are now significant, accounting for between a fifth and a third of all opens depending on sector:
Key findings from…
How many subscribers open and then click on your emails on different types of mobile devices?
The growth in mobile web access and the implications for mobile optimised web design is now well-known, but what about the implications for email marketers and email design?
Some new research by Pure360 Missing a moving target: Mobile device opens and click through rates summarised in this infographic reviews the impact across different sectors.
Litmus also have some great research on the popularity of accessing email over mobile - see their research at the end of this post.
For me, this data point from the infographic had the biggest impact, how does your mobile unique click to open rate compare?
28% of Emails are Opened on mobile devices...
but only 10% lead to clicks.
This research is based on detailed analysis of over 35,000 different emails sent by over 119 companies in 23 sectors.
The…
Video summary of three different mobile email design options
It's common now for marketers to ask the question, "will our emails work on mobile?". But it's not that simple unfortunately... there are several different ways to tackle this and each has its own jargon. So I created this video to help explain the different terminologies such as scalable, skinny and responsive email design.
[arve url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxnkP03G3I8" /]
Don't have time to view the video? Here's a transcript explaining the alternatives.
1. Fluid Design: The text always takes up 100% of the width of the window, so as you change the width of your email with your browser, it automatically reflows and fits in the window - whether it's for mobile, tablet, desktop etc.
2. Skinny design. No reflow here, so as you change the width of the window, nothing changes within the content. Companies such as Coke tend to design their email narrow to…
Plus 5 things The Hobbit can teach us about email marketing
This is the time of year when we bloggers sit down to write about all the exciting developments and innovations expected over the next 12 months. You know, those game-changing technologies and trends that will represent the "2013 Email Challenge".
It's either that or write about "5 things The Hobbit can teach us about email marketing". Actually, there are a few things the hobbit can teach us, here you go:
Build anticipation
Maintain interest with a multipart content series
Don't try to appeal to everyone (you can't and you don't want to anyway)
Sometimes longer is better...and sometimes it isn't
Use new technology as a tool, not as an end in itself
Anyway, hot trends and innovations are important, but there are basic, less glamorous tasks that need taking care of, too. Perhaps what is most important is things that aren't…
This infographic from Return Path is a reminder of how the popularity of smartphones and tablets means we have to carefully test our Emails on these devices and think about the changing context of use for email. Apple devices are particularly important accounting for 85% of all email mobile opens.
If you look at the trends it seems mobile could exceed both mobile email client access could exceed both desktop and webmail access to email.
The infographic is based on one billion emails sent by 500 corporate Return Path clients comparing 2012 to 2011.…
7 Tips for more effective mobile emails
Email and mobile together are already functioning as a team, whether we as marketers want them to or not. The customers and consumers have voted with their usage. They’re not sitting around waiting for marketers to get their act together, but as I write this between 20-60% of your database will be reading your marketing emails on their mobile device.
If designed and planned well, email and mobile together, will, in the forthcoming years, form a formidable marketing force. So marketers, a question: Will you be leading the way and profiting from your competitors lack of preparedness? Or will your competitors be profiting from yours?
Challenges
Many marketers get stuck here and go no further. In no way am I trying to minimize the challenges that lay ahead for a marketer to optimise the mobile email journey – however they are certainly not as insurmountable as they…
Ideas for increasing your responses by using a more human approach...
What would you say if I was to suggest you take account of your target audience when designing your email program?
Actually, you'd probably say nothing... just roll your eyes and find fresh reading material.
It's not exactly groundbreaking advice.
However, the nature of digital marketing seduces us into thinking of the "audience" as a collection of data or unfeeling robots.
So we have segments, samples, cells and clusters...where each email address is a set of numbers, a sequence of letters and a few database fields.
Of course, each email address also represents a human being (gasp!).
Not a shocking concept, I'll admit, but one we often neglect in the way we design emails and email systems. Yet a recognition of human foibles and limitations helps build better emails for better response.
Here are some examples showing…
and six mistakes to avoid disastrous mobile emails
A couple of days ago we summarised the latest Comscore research showing the popularity of email on mobile devices.
Given the rise and rise of mobile email, it's important to ask your agency or ESP what they're doing to get the email experience right for subscribers using mobile devices. To help here, earlier in the year we wrote a 5 step guide to designing emails for mobile you may want to check out.
I hope this new infographic may also help - it's from Litmus, the email testing service. Step 6 is making sure you test on the main platforms you're targeting.
Print / view large scale infographic.
…
Mobile email marketing popularity statistics
New in-depth mobile device usage statistics - October 2011
Comscore have released an intriguingly titled report Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits. This adds to data presented below from earlier on mobile usage of email.
Although the report title references the US, there's also data from elsewhere in the World too. In fact this is one of the main insights from the report. This is an in-depth report which is worth downloading if you're working on a mobile marketing strategy. These were the 3 main highlights for me:
1. The importance of mobile (and tablet) access to email and web will vary dramatically by country.
I included this chart since as well as showing the country differences, it also shows the breakdown between mobile and tablet which is the majority of the darker "non-computer device traffic" shown here. Tablet…
