Mobile email: critical survey insights for marketers

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on July 12, 2007

Good news and bad news drops out of a large study of mobile email use by ExactTarget.

If you're like me, you express the fervent hope that recipients are quite happy to wait until they're back at the PC before reading your marketing email.

That would take some pressure off the need to get emails to look halfway decent on a handheld device (a tricky task, as we'll see.)

Fortunately, the survey gives succor to our hopes. According to ExactTarget, mobile email users are indeed mainly scanning their mail for important one-to-one messages, and leaving the rest for later perusal on a desktop or laptop.

Very few mobile email users are actually clicking on links or making purchases through their Blackberry, Treo or cell phone. In fact, 46% of those surveyed had never, ever clicked on a link in an email displayed on their mobile device.

Of course, as the technology improves and unfamiliarity with mobile Internet use drops, you can expect more people to start interacting "properly" with their email. So there's no justification for putting your head in the sand.

The authors don't let us off the hook, either. They note that it's important to pique the interest of the mobile user, so that when they do go back to the home or office, they'll be more likely to take the time to check your message.

How do you do this?

(Now the "bad" news.) At the moment, there seem to be no meaningful standards out there regarding how an email is displayed on a mobile device.

The study authors say your safest bet, then, is to ensure the first few lines in the text part of your multipart mime email do the job of stimulating interest.

So it looks like it's time to pay more attention to the "lowly" text version of your message. (And it's another argument in favor of text-only messages for those enjoying a hefty HTML versus text debate.)

It's also important to note that if mobile email users are looking at your email when they return to the PC, then letting people choose "mobile/PDA" as a format choice when signing up to your emails could backfire.

Why?

Because, as the authors note, the fancy text/HTML emails may look bad on the mobile device, but people are likely reading them on a PC later anyway.

The "designed-for-mobile" messages might look good on the mobile device, but the reduced design functionality and messaging space mean it's hard to make an impact (might as well use SMS?)

And when the user returns to the PC, your message is, frankly, pretty drab when compared to the lovely design and copy of your PC-hugging competitors.

In more bad/good news, mobile email is spreading beyond its traditional domain of the affluent businessperson. As prices for devices drop and the technology matures, more and more "ordinary" people are joining the mobile email bandwagon. So B2C marketers beware.

What this basically means is that if mobile email isn't on your mind now, then it ought to be soon. The study's press release is a good introduction, but you can download the full 27 page report after the obligatory free registration.

The full results offer more data on user demographics (based on responses from just under 300 actual users of email and over 4000 mobile phone owners), attitudes, rendering issues and similar. With nine email design recommendations.

My favorite insight: 43% of mobile email users check their email when in bed. Which might explain the divorce rate.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this new challenge for email marketing. I'd be interested, for example, to see if the reported mobile email user habits and attitudes differ depending on the wireless device used to access the email.

Will people still need or want to catch up on email on the PC if they're using a nice large-screen PDA, custom-designed for mobile email? As opposed to a tiny cell phone with mediocre email functionality?

Update: Anne Holland has a slightly alternative view over at David Baker's blog.

Tags: mobile email, wireless email, email design

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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