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.
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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…
UK DMA's survey reveals key insights for email marketers
One of the challenges for email marketers is to stop thinking like email marketers.
A lot of assumptions about best practices are based on our collective view of just what's going on inside consumer inboxes. But this view is biased by what's going on inside our own inboxes.
If you're an email marketer, you're probably an online regular with a heavy duty email account or accounts. The same can't be said of the proverbial man and woman in the street: the people who typically get the actual emails.
Our email experience is not their email experience.
Or is it?
Truth is we don't really know.
Surveys of end users can, however, help correct our misconceptions. They provide important insight into how we might adapt our email campaigns to the reality of end-user inboxes...to the benefit of the email bottom line.
The UK DMA, fast.MAP and Alchemy Worx recently …
Using touchpoint analysis and surveys to find how much email really contributes
Since many email marketing services focus their reporting on open and click rates it can be difficult to show how email is influencing leads or purchase and so invest in putting more resources into email marketing to test, learn and refine.
From opens and clicks to value generated per email campaign
If you are using email marketing to drive visits to a transactional web site you are in a much better position to make the business case since you can use analytics or the email system itself to show sales generated by email. The you can start comparing the effectiveness of emails and reviewing their value through using measures like Revenue generated per 1000 emails sent, much more meaningful than open and click rates.
Using attribution modeling for email marketing
Since reporting in many email service providers is based on a…
New email delivery survey shows surprisingly poor inbox delivery
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Return Path H1 2011 worldwide Email delivery review, Sept 2011
Although the delivery rate provided by email marketing tools is the percentage of emails that didn’t bounce.
According to Tim Watson If you are emailing at least weekly to each email address on your customer base and you have good list hygiene practices in place then your delivery rate should be over 98%, that is less than 2% of emails sent are bounced.
But, and it’s a big but, delivery rate isn’t the same as inbox delivery and this survey shows how real inbox delivery is much lower – around 81% on average – this is really “money you’re leaving on the table”, so it shows why email delivery is worth taking seriously.
The recent survey shows that just over 3/4 emails get through to…
Examples of testing the best time of day for email broacast
Last week we looked at the ideas on the best day of the week to send an email for different audiences.
This week I review a related issue, asking: "is there a best time of the day to send an email?" Again, the answer is "yes, definitely", but it depends, so you have to test it. It depends on audience, but I hope these 3 examples show it's worth testing.
Update - September 2011
I spotted a nice, simple infographic to support the stats later in this post. It can help you review the factors that may affect consumer attention during the day. These considerations also apply in B2B and the attention available during the office day - for example we find our newsletter works best around 8-9AM as can tweets/shares - also around lunchtime - although that's called the "Abyss"…
Three examples where absolute email marketing truth is...relative
As the original "killer app", email marketing has accumulated a lot of truths and best practices through its long history.
Some of those survive because they remain relevant, but some persist simply through the power of repetition and tradition. A constant challenge is working out what's really true in email.
What's a genuine best practice? What's a recommended practice for most (but not all) cases? What apparent truths are no longer relevant or accurate in an ever-changing online business environment?
Here are three examples of commonly-heard generalities about email marketing that are grounded in truth, but where the devil is in the details...
1. Email is about relationships
I'm not going to deny that. After all, in my previous column I argued that more attention should be given to the subtle, indirect and relationship impacts of a regular stream of emails passing across the inbox of your prospect…
Avoiding the accidental reasons why your marketing emails may not get through
The surprising thing about email deliverability is there are some common causes that are often innocent mistakes and can be avoided. The first two posts in this series covered how ISPs filter and how to monitor your deliverability.
In this post I'm covering some of the common issues I've seen happen, although they're not all obvious. I'll also give some tips on how they can be avoided.
Reason 1 Lack of transparency
High spam complaint levels occur when subscriber expectation is not managed correctly. This is either due to a lack of transparency about emails that will be sent or by setting an expectation and not adhering to it.
Typically this happens when an email address is provided for a specific purpose such as to get a quote, make a purchase, obtain a whitepaper, enter a competition or to create a…
This time next year it will be the 30th anniversary of Email. This is a great infographic (see full interactive version) reminding us of how email has grown in importance for consumers and marketers and the challenges of managing it such as deliverability and rendering across different email readers.
Email use is still on the rise. Did you know that the number of email accounts grew from 1.8 billion to 3.1 billion between 2009 and 2011?
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Our interview with Jordie van Rijn of Email Vendor Selection
When I’m running training courses on email marketing, there are almost always marketers on the course who are dissatisfied with their current email provider or are just looking to move up from using Outlook to send emails.
I’m always happy to give recommendations on email services and encourage others on the course to share suppliers they’re happy with. The problem with just basing your decision on recommendations is, of course, that every business has different needs according to their size and how they want to use Email marketing. So the question becomes “how do we decide on the right email service provider for us?” As independent email marketing consultant and founder of the Email Vendor Selection, I thought Jordie van Rijn would be an excellent person to help answer this question.
Jordie specializes in email marketing and event-driven campaigns and his company…
