How to adapt your marketing as mobile email spreads
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on March 18, 2008
Barely a day goes by without another new development suggesting the spread of mobile email among both businesses and consumers will accelerate. But how do you adapt to that as a sender of marketing email?The first job is to find out exactly which of your subscribers is viewing your email on a mobile device.
And already our mobile strategy hits a wall. How do you do this?
You can't.
But you can start to tag at least some of your subscribers as mobile users by, for example...
- Surveying your audience and asking who wants a mobile version of your email
- Adding a mobile option to the format preference you offer at sign-up or in a subscriber preference center (see this post by Raj Khera for an explanation)
Sending to those using mobile email
This group gets email optimized for mobile devices.
"Optimized for mobile devices" is easily said of course, but what does that mean? There are two aspects:
1. Designing for the physical and technological limitations of the mobile device
2. Designing for the mobile user (who has different email habits to someone sitting in an office or at a home PC)
Nobody has any proven answers for mobile email design, since there's still too much variety out there in terms of how different smartphones etc. treat email. But you'll find suggestions here and some design testing tools now include mobile devices in their testing mix.
As time goes by, mobile devices will get better and better at handling email. We've already seen how the iPhone is HTML email ready, a concept soon to be applied in Blackberrys, traditionally a disaster area for HTML email.
This trend will make mobile email design easier and let you focus on other problems.
And here are your first two:
- Those using mobile email may also use a desktop or laptop to check mail some of the time.
- Many mobile email users save non-essential (but useful) emails for viewing later back in the home/office on the desktop or laptop. And many (most?) marketing emails fall into this category.
Hmmm.
An alternative then is to use the design approach recommended below for those reading in traditional email environments, but who might be using mobile devices too...
Sending to those not using mobile email
This group can get your "normal" emails. Or can they?
Inevitably, some of those not (yet) identified as using a mobile device to view email will still do so. Especially if you have a B2B list.
Your job here then is to take account of this possibility in your design, but without making any drastic changes that cramp your impact on traditional email users, who still make up most of this group.
Two possible solutions here:
1. Add a link at the very top of the email to an online version of your email optimized for mobile users.
If the email looks rotten to the recipient, they can always clickthrough to a clean, online version.
2. Ensure your from line, subject line and the very top of your email quickly communicate two critical facts: who you are and the value in your email.
That way, the mobile email user will likely save your email for later and a viewing environment (PC, etc.) better suited to your email design.
(Actually point 2 is useful advice for all email anyway, since recognition of both the sender and the email's value drive open rates and responses.)
Any other suggestions (or corrections to the above) for adapting to the mobile email revolution?
More on mobile email | Tags: email marketing, mobile email, wireless email, email design
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6 Comments:
Hi Mark:
In fact we use an approach in our product to try to be able to adapt to this, as I described in my Noveber 2007 blog post, 'Mobile e-mail is going to replace SMS in the near future' (http://www.theemailingexperience.com/EN/PermaLink,guid,eb65d052-51d3-4af5-9990-f1be1f9c5028.aspx) and have commented several times in our blog.
I think that the best way to go is to send dual e-mail. One version that you can be sure that is correctly displayed in any mobile device, and another one specific for the desktop.
As you correctly pointed out, almost everyone that receive e-mail in their mobile devices can do two things with it: delete it or read it briefly and keep it for later reading in their desktops.
With this approach if you receive an email while on the road and you can see a small summary in your device, you can decide if it's interesting for you and keep it for later reading, or just delte it.
Ok, your recipients don't get a very nice HTML formated e-mail on the phone, but at least they get the information they need and you get sure that every single phone in the market can read it.
I think HTML e-mail in the phone its not yet a good idea because you will get into more problems than you solve: if you riPhone customers read it OK, the rest of them will not.
While there is not a wide adopton of devices that can correctly display e-mail (and is going to take a long time to be a fact: 'Japan marks funeral for second-generation phones' (http://www.theemailingexperience.com/EN/PermaLink,guid,31970c50-50f9-4961-956c-0ef4a4e4054d.aspx)) I think it's better to stick to the dual approach.
Regards
JM.
By 
José Manuel Alarcón Aguín, on
21 March, 2008
Thanks JM. The key there I guess is ensuring you know who uses what reading interface so you can segment versions like you describe.
By 
Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
21 March, 2008
Mark:
I think I haven´t expain well in my previous comment... Sorry for that.
In fact if you send a DUAL email which includes BOTH the mobile and the desktop version of your e-mail at the same time, it's not neccessary to segment your recipients. When they read the e-mail from their desktops they will automatically see the full-fledged HTML version, and when they are on the road and read the e-mail from their devices they will automatically see the mobile version. And if they read it both on the road and later in their desktop they will see both versions, each one in one situation.
No need to choose. They'll see what suits best for the current situation.
That's why, for example, every e-mail sent with our tool, if you don't specifically generate an alternative mobile version, will generate it automatically for you, so that every sent e-mail will be dual.
Thanks.
JM.
By Jose Manuel Alarcon Aguin, on
21 March, 2008
Ah, I see. But how do you make sure the mobile device displays the mobile version? Whenever I see vendors talk about multipart mime etc., they find that some/many mobile devices still try and display the HTML version, ignoring the simple text-only version. Or is there some clever technology I don't know about?
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
21 March, 2008
Hi Mark:
You're right. Here in Spain we only have problems with the dreadful Blackberry e-mail client that "thinks" that it can show HTML e-mail while it can not (in fact is the RIM server that does this, not the device).
In these cases theres nothing you can do about it, but all in that I think is better to send multipart dual e-mails.
In my oppinion the better way to go while not every single device in the market can read HTML (wich is going to take a while) is send both text and HTML versiones together.
Of course I can be wrong (and I probably would) :-)
By Jose Manuel Alarcon Aguin, on
21 March, 2008
No, I agree, multipart is definitely a good move. And is a sound practice for sending email anyway.
Then those devices that do show the text version get a nice clean email to display.
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
21 March, 2008
