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Email marketing: The importance of being mobile
11th April 2011. Posted by Tom Braithwaite. Trackback
When people are late it annoys me. I just hate waiting around. I understand that this statement is extremely hypercritical because all my friends will say that I’m always late for everything, but I stand by it.
The growth in smart phones however, has made this annoyance easier to deal with because I can pass the time by checking my emails, playing games and seeing which team is beating Forest that day.
It turns out I’m not alone either and with 13% of subscribers reading emails on their mobiles last year, and that number set to grow rapidly this year, marketers are looking increasingly at how to make their email campaigns more mobile.
Smart phones will outsell PCs for the first time in 2011 and the Email Newsletter Usability Report 2010 (catchy name) by Nielsen Norman Group stated that more people were engaging with e-newsletters on their mobiles because of the ‘boredom factor’. Users can kill time by flicking through emails whilst they wait which means that marketers will now need to place more of an emphasis on formatting e-newsletters for mobiles and making sure they are designed to incorporate touch screen technology.
I recently listened to a webinar about creating successful email campaigns in 2011 and the speakers from DM Inbox and Silverpop provided some great advice for the coming year.
Design for touch
Last year, 65% of all subscribers that read email content on their mobiles did so on an iPhone. Between 20 - 25 million entry-level Android smart phones will be sold in the global market in 2011, which is a lot more than the 2.5 - 3 million units sold in 2010. So, if you haven’t already, now is a good time to start designing for touch.
Be more social
Creating links to a company’s social media platforms should be the first thing you think about when planning email marketing content. Following a recent National Express promotion that pointed customers to its Facebook page, the coach operator found that the link offering money off selected journeys was shared by 800 people and resulted in 80,000 additional page impressions on its fan page. The company saw 8% organic list growth and three times its normal click-through rates because of the promotion.
Social media provides a more efficient way of targeting consumers. A normal email campaign would ordinarily be sent to a huge, crudely targeted list that would result in any call to action being effective on that sub-set of recipients alone. When utilising social media platforms, if the content of the email campaign is interesting enough, it will most likely be forwarded to a new audience of very similar recipients that are ready to act.
Know what stage you are performing on
Email marketing will go through some big changes this year following the introduction of Facebook email, Hotmail’s Active View and Gmail’s Priority Inbox in 2010.
Facebook email will be used by 50% of users with 8% using it as their main email address. Hotmail Active View will give companies the chance to put a mini website inside the user’s inbox, which will provide instant access to interactive content.
Because of the changes, marketers will need to think about everything from the subject line (which doesn’t appear in Facebook email) to the creation of scalable images and fonts that take into account the different platforms, of which mobile will be the one to watch.
It seems that as more and more people are using long queues and waiting times as a chance to check their inbox, it is more important than ever to be mobile.