What does mobile mean anyway?

If you ask any email marketer how important ‘mobile’ is to them, they’ll tell you it’s absolutely essential. And it’s hard to argue with this opinion with open rates hitting as high as 50-70% on mobile devices in some cases.

Is mobile a device or channel?
But what does the term ‘mobile’ actually mean for email marketers? Is mobile a device or a channel? Why are we not talking about laptop marketing? Is it simply the practice of optimising design and content for different smartphones or tablets? For example, the larger screen on the iPhone 5 will ensure that recipients can see more of your email without scrolling. Perhaps mobile marketing is everything to do with a physical location?

What mobile means to email marketers
It’s clear mobile marketing means many things to many people. So what does it mean to those of us in the email marketing world? To prove my point, just think about how you interact with email during the day.

Checking my email is one of the first things I do when I wake up in the morning. I know I’m sad but I do, and looking at the open rates across all of our clients I know lots of other people do too! This of course should make us revisit the question of when is the best time to send an email, but that’s a post for another day!

I probably won’t reply or action anything first thing in the morning, but I’ll do an initial scan and delete messages that I am not interested in. I’ll save personal and work-related emails to deal with later. I may go through this process again when I am on the train to work. Work-related messages will then be checked again and dealt with on my desktop when I’m in the office. Non-work messages will wait until I’m on the sofa with my feet up in the evening browsing on my iPad or laptop.

Mobile and last click syndrome
Am I a ‘mobile recipient’? Yes, I am. But I’m more than that. If I convert on my tablet in the evening, that doesn’t mean my opens during the day on different devices weren’t all steps that helped take me from open to click to buy. Are we suffering from last click attribution here?

This complexity is a challenge for email marketers. To achieve consistent levels of design and formatting, emails need to include responsive design rather than completely separate templates so that the same email will render effectively no matter which device/s I choose to use at any one time.

So what steps should email marketers be taking to survive in this complex, multi-device world?

Do your research
Responsive design will help you render an email no matter what the screen size might be, but you might find that some devices are more popular among your recipients than others. Analyse your open rates; you may be surprised at what you find. If you find certain trends, then it makes sense to factor this into your design.

Timing
Further analysis might allow you to see whether your users are more likely to use certain devices at certain times of day. If you know your recipients are more likely to be on a work desktop during the day then you might want to send a different email to the one you send first thing in the morning when they’ll be using their smartphone on the morning commute.

Triggers
Connected to the previous point, you should also check how you are using triggers. If a recipient opens an email on the morning commute, you might want to schedule a trigger with a special offer for the evening when they’ll be thinking about buying. Or if you send an email reminder about an in-store sale this weekend, set up a mobile-optimised trigger to send on Saturday afternoon to coincide with a trip to the high street.

Optimisation
Mobile devices come in all shapes, sizes and systems. Obviously there will be formatting differences between smartphones and tablets, but different rendering specifications could apply too. An obvious example is that some Android smartphones will have images turned off by default. This is another element to factor into your design.

Social
Any discussion of ‘mobile’ email wouldn’t be complete without at least a nod towards social media and location. A key differentiator for mobile devices is the social elements that can be deployed, making the most of location and check-in data. If you see a customer check in at a store, how about you combine this with an email offer that can be opened on a mobile device? Of course, in an ideal world, you would match check-ins with data collection. If you are going to offer special offers via Foursquare or Facebook, include a data capture element; don’t just provide a code to use there and then. Collect the email address of the customer so that it can be used for email marketing purposes in future. This is a great way of starting to monetise some of your social interactions.

TinkTaylor, founder & COO of dotDigitalgroup PLC, and MD of dotMailer

@TinkTaylor

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