Optimise your emails for mobile.
Email is back. Back with a vengeance.
Written off a few years ago because of a combination of SPAM, social media and Gen Y/Z using new, non-email ways to communicate, the email has returned truly triumphant.
In some instances, it accounts for at least 50% of sales in a well-coordinated campaign.
Ask any group-buying website what is important to them and email, and their email database will rank very highly if not at the top.
The technology is getting smarter; rather than spraying, we’re increasingly building segmented databases, sending emails based on individual user behaviour and getting smarter and smarter about subject lines and body content.
We still think of email as being intrinsically linked to Outlook and Gmail.
This has to change.
Mobile and the email
No matter the work or life patterns, we are reading more and more emails on our Smartphones and tablets.
It could be on a Blackberry between meetings or a slower paced read on an iPhone on the train-ride home, though we now see far more email on a small screen, 30 centimeters from our face.
In the same way that websites are being optimised for Smartphones, emails must also be.
After all, they are the logical start of the journey for your users; send them the offer and ideally, they click away to your mobile-optimised website.
If your email doesn’t fit the screen and take advantage of the opportunities (and limitations) of the smaller screen however, the journey is much harder to start.
And if email is so important to the sale and you know that your users are reading them on their phones, there is no excuse.
I will write another blog on what it means to optimise an email for Smartphone, though have a look at some great statistics put together by eConsultancy on their blog.
The takeouts are twofold:
- Email consumption on Smartphones is growing. Duh.
- Few companies are thinking about it; and therein lies your opportunity.