Mobilising your email marketing
27 Feb 2013
Today confirmed what I’ve suspected for months. Preparing for the panel debate at TFM&A on mobile and email, I spotted Econsultancy’s estimate that email is used by 75% of British iPhone owners, making it the most popular internet activity on the phone.
My fellow panelists, including email experts from Silverpop, Pure360, and Neolane, provided further evidence that mobile users are hungry for email on their smartphones and tablets. Pure360’s Marc Munier believes more than 50% of B2C email is now opened on mobile or tablet devices.
So am I alone in feeling disappointed by the quality of most of the emails I pick up on my iPhone and iPad? Apparently not… another Econsultancy report puts the number of companies not optimising their email for mobile at a staggering 84%.
I’m a mobile specialist, not an email expert, and I don’t want to repeat what most readers know already about best practice email marketing. I’m going to focus on the key differences between email marketing on PC and non-mobile to challenge the way you are approaching this subject.
Understand and meet customer needs
This sounds obvious, but the customer must come first. Long-term success in mobile hinges on truly understanding your customer’s needs and his or her mobile behaviour and motivations across the customer lifecycle.
Consider the merits of sending and receiving email at various stages in the route to purchase, and the relative benefits over other channels, particularly SMS and in-app push notifications. Give users the option to receive messaging via email alongside SMS and app-push, monitor and follow their preferences. And wherever you can, run A/B tests to track preference shifts.
Mobile's role in the customer journey. Copyright Smart Insights/Burner Mobile
Achieve standout
Like many mobile marketers, I’ve been comparing open rates and click-throughs of SMS and email for many years. SMS marketing remains in rude health, despite free alternatives, such as WhatsApp, iMessenger and Viber.
SMS marketers claim 90% of messages are opened within 15 minutes of receipt. Contrast that to the open rate in email of only 20-25% within 24 hours of receipt.
Many of the principles with PC email apply here – make sure your subject lines are compelling and avoid words and grammar which is likely to get you in the spam filters.
Respect privacy, and don’t intrude
On the subject of spam, email marketers taking to mobile must consider the golden rule of mobile: you need to earn permission and trust to be on your customers’ handsets. Mobile is not a free-for-all channel for unscrupulous spam-merchants, who are finding to their cost the collateral and reputational damage they risk by sending unsolicited bulk messages to unsuspecting targets. The high profile PPI campaign includes the opt-out, but fails to respect it. Result – a hefty fine from Ofcom. The regulator has teeth!
No mobile orginator shown
Spam SMS merchants pay the price
Contextual relevance
Remember the multi-tasking mobile consumer is very easily distracted. Ask yourself how engaged you really are reading emails on your mobile while continually checking to see whether the train is arriving or the plane is departing, whether your son has scored the goal, and what the in-app push notification is all about.
This is all pretty obvious when you think about it – to win with mobile you have to cater for users' genuine intent, and the context. In short, keep it simple easy, provide clear calls to action, slick location based offers, click to call functionality and prominent links to mobile-optimised landing pages or app downloads.
Critically, make sure page loads are lightning fast. In the same way slow-loading mobile sites are punished by Google with lower page rankings, slow-loading emails will be deleted by your impatient mobile customers.
Design considerations
Adapting your email marketing for tablet and mobile devices presents rendering challenges for the multiple devices, and every pixel must be used to maximize the user experience. This short blog does not allow space to cover this one in detail. Kath Pay of Plan to Engage summarises the 7 tips to optimise your email for mobile in this blog post, which places a strong focus on user experience –particularly designing for touch and designing for instant interaction.
I’d provide three key points here:
- Keep it simple - less is more
- Remember the 80/20 rule - they spend 80% of their time above the fold, design accordingly
- Use wireframes to provide structure and stick to count limits - leave them wanting more rather than reaching for the unsubscribe button
Form factor and size
The obvious challenge is designing for a smaller screen. Fortunately, all internet-enabled phones (that’s all phones) include browsers and email clients based on the WebKit rendering engine, which has fantastic HTML and CSS support. This includes the iPhone, Android devices, webOS, Samsung’s Dolfin browser and the most recent versions of RIM’s browser for Blackberry. You can read more about how this is achieved through media queries.
You can create separate versions of your email for html and mobile in your preference centre and then let people choose between the two. But most won’t select their preference, so a more common approach is to actively target recipients who your analytics or email software indicates are using a mobile, send them the ‘mobile-optimised’ version.
Testing for conversion rate optimisation
Savvy businesses seek to update their mobile sites, SMS marketing and mobile emails frequently to help them improve customer journeys and experiences to improve sales. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) has developed as a technique that focuses on improving the returns from sites and through a structured approach blending customer research, analytics and competitor benchmarking. It involves a change in mindset in applying web analytics from reporting to analysis and improvement.
CRO has evolved from an initial focus on boosting conversion through testing alternative versions of landing pages and homepages to a more holistic review of customer needs and user journeys on a site to increase sales. It involves using analytics to map out your entire sales/conversion funnel backed up by customer research to understand customer needs. You should be looking to apply CRO principles to your mobile email marketing to maximise engagement, conversion and ROI.
Case study: BA
BA promotes app via mobile email campaign optimised for multiple devices
- BA wanted to promote their mobile app
- They checked their readership
- They created specific versions for each type of mobile i.e iPhone, Blackberry etc
- Added a desktop link
- Exceeded expectations with 60,000 downloads
- iPhone users: 50% opens & 30% CTR
Rob Thurner, Founding Partner, Burner Mobile
Click here to download Rob’s Mobile Marketing Strategy guide, co-authored by Dr Dave Chaffey
