Time to optimise for mobile?

The mobile market is changing fast. More than one in four UK adults now owns a smartphone, and over half of these were purchased in the past year (1).

Email is one of the things we use smartphones for the most, so the boom in smartphone ownership raises some critical questions for email marketers. Has smartphone take-up reached critical mass? And, more importantly, if it has, should all emails now be optimised for mobile?

I think there are more important questions to answer. Like how are people using smartphones alongside traditional email? And how does smartphone use translate to purchases?

So what does this mean for email marketers?
Right now for example, we know only a minority of people open marketing emails on the move – and only a tiny number go on to purchase. According to data collected by Return Path in September 2011, only 23% of marketing emails are viewed on mobile devices. The vast majority are still accessed through the traditional webmail and desktop channels (2).

Costs versus conversion
Do you read emails on your mobile? Or do you note the interesting ones and save them to read later on a bigger screen? Either way, you’ll have to read who the email was from and the subject line before you make a decision.

Small screens and varying levels of connectivity mean that smartphones aren’t the ideal way to browse products, enter your credit card details and make an online purchase today. It seems most would prefer to do it in the comfort and privacy of their desktop environment.

Around 80% of “opens” occur within 48 hours of sending, but only 15% of sales happen in the first 24 hours. Given the clunky user experience of smartphones, it’s a fair assumption that most mobile users will complete their transactions from their desktop later on.

Mobile optimisation?
Email is a driver of traffic and, as such, should not be the first step in mobile optimisation. The entire customer journey needs to be examined and optimised – and, for most, that begins with your website.

In the meantime, brands could focus on subject lines as a critically important way of starting the sale process. In contrast to optimising the latter stages of a customer’s journey – like making the body of your email mobile friendly for example – it requires little, if any, investment.

Consider also the limitations of the device versus the desktop. Smaller screens mean less information, and if your emails generally feature lots of product shots, you’ll need to get accustomed to prioritising the items you serve up and cutting back.

A word on tablet devices
Research has also shown that people tend to use tablets in a completely different way to smartphones, spending more than double the amount of time a typical desktop user would consuming content online – and this includes email. Tablet conversion rates are significantly higher than smartphone rates (3). So designing your emails for the desktop, but using touch-friendly calls to action better suited to tablets, may prove to be a the right approach once tablet usage reaches critical mass on your subscriber list.

To find out more about mobile email, we recently released a mobile email white paper.

Riaz Kanani, Marketing Director, Alchemy Worx

Notes
1. http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/cmr11/UK_CMR_2011_FINAL.pdf

2. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008743

3. http://www.comscore.com/layout/set/popup/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/Digital_Omnivores

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