Survey Reveals Mobile Email Trends: Where Is Your Subscriber?

We are on the go and so is our inbox, according to a new report from eROI. For some time now the focus of email marketers has been getting to the inbox and making sure that the message is compatible with whatever email client the subscriber is using.

While the personal computer has stabilized and standardized to a great degree and the email client wars have shrunk to only a few major combatants, what seems to have snuck up on the outside are new devices for accessing those inboxes. It’s no longer only a case of what client they are using, but what device and even where they are at which affects readability.

Now marketers have to contend with where their subscribers might be when they read the email. Are they at the office or on a train or at a football game? You just can’t be sure where anyone is these days and that complicates the issue. Where your subscriber is may well be as important as the day or time you send the email to them.

In other words, it’s 11 PM and do you know where your subscriber is? A key finding of the report is that there is no real universal case study for mobile subscribers. Your mobile messaging should be tailored to your specific subscriber base.

The report found that subscribers are more likely to be mobile from Thursday afternoon through the weekend. While that may not come as a surprise, it does mean that if you send your emails out in that range, you need to be even more mobile device friendly.

Mobile devices started out at a reasonably slow pace, but this is accelerating as would a sled on an icy slope. The technology is picking up speed and adoption is increasing at an exponential rate. Those who do not now take a good look at how their subscribers are interacting with their messages will find themselves left behind fast.

The report suggests marketers use a tool such as Litmus to determine what devices subscribers are using and when. Tracking this information over a 30-60 day period should show some trends and give you a deeper understanding of how to optimize your campaigns to suit your subscribers best. Knowing this will allow you to efficiently allocate the resources you have available.

As well, don’t forget using this data to optimize the content and landing pages you are driving subscribers to. If that content and those pages are not optimized for the preferred platforms, then your work is not done.

And while device detection is pretty much a non-starter for email clients, there is technology available to detect devices for your website and landing pages and you can then tailor that content accordingly.

As well, simply putting a “mobile friendly” version link in your emails can go a long way to smoothing the user experience for mobile users.