Mobile email: the marketing challenges

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blackberry tourLife is full of unavoidable truths, mostly involving waistlines and wrinkles.

One of them is that more and more people are reading your emails on a mobile device.

While we all feel we should somehow take account of that in our email design and strategy, few of us do. Mostly because it's hard to work out exactly how to deal with the "mobile email challenge".

The problems start when we try and work out what exactly the "mobile email challenge" is. Much advice on the topic carefully avoids going into detail because the challenges (plural) are various and changing.

Back in 2008, Morgan Stewart summed it up succinctly:

"There is no simple quick fix."

So we shrug and kind of hope it's not a big deal.

Now I'm a big fan of the General Melchett approach...

"If nothing else works, then a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through."

...but strong sales of smartphones suggest the time has come to look at the topic in detail.

This post outlines the current status of mobile email use and the associated challenges. A follow-up post then explores some of the ways we might adapt our emails and even benefit from this trend.

Mobile email capabilities are increasing


The use of mobile email is clearly linked to the availability of email-ready mobile devices, particularly smartphones (phones incorporating advanced PC-like features and strong online capabilities).

According to analysts Gartner, 36.4 million smartphones sold worldwide in Q1, 2009, accounting for 13.5% of all new mobile phone sales.

With all the iPhone love around, you may be surprised to find that the Gartner stats show Nokia is the global smartphone market leader, with 41.2% market share.

Research in Motion (RIM, makers of BlackBerry devices) comes in a distant second with 19.9%. Apple smartphones have "just" a 10.8% share of the market (double the equivalent number in Q1, 2008).

In terms of operating systems, almost half of all smartphones (49.3%) use Symbian.

Market shares differ regionally, of course. Both RIM and Apple post far better numbers in the USA, for example.

These smartphone numbers are likely to grow:
  • Juniper Research predicts that annual sales of smartphones will reach over 300 million by 2013, representing about a quarter of the mobile phone market.
  • A Kelsey Group study of US mobile phone users back in 2008 found that 49% planned to buy an advanced mobile device within the next two years.
Clearly, millions and millions of email users do or will own a phone with very advanced mobile email capabilities.

Mobile email is a top smartphone activity


In that same Kelsey study, around 40% of mobile phone users said they'd used their mobile phone to go online. And a Netpop report noted that "For Americans, the top three services on the mobile web are e-mail, texting and weather."

A recent ComScore study of mobile phone use in the UK discovered that 13.1% of all mobile phone users had accessed email through their device. More importantly, 35.4% of smartphone users and a massive 75.4% of iPhone users had done so.

So not only are there millions of email-ready mobile devices out there, but people do actually use them to check email.

HTML email capabilities are growing


Given the above, a prime concern of email marketers was always the way in which mobile phones displayed email.

The good news is that popular and newer smartphones are getting much better at handling HTML: the iPhone's excellent treatment of HTML email has forced others to catch up.

Last year, for example, HTML email support arrived for BlackBerry devices through OS and software updates. And the latest release of Nokia Messaging for mobile devices using the S60 software platform with the Symbian OS now supports HTML email.

[If you like your jargon, spend 10 minutes browsing through mobile phone manufacturers' websites. If you don't, stay well clear.]

So if smartphones are getting as good as PCs at reading emails, is the whole mobile email issue going away? Unfortunately...no.

Mobile email challenge 1: rendering


First, there are still devices and systems around that are very poor at handling HTML email.

The classic problem of mobile email design, where incoming mail may be stripped of the HTML code or the code itself is displayed etc. is still around, though it will decline with time.

Second, even the newer models that work adequately with HTML, images and even attachments have displays constrained by the physical nature of the device itself.

Put simply, the size of the screen is much smaller than for a PC or laptop. That alone has implications for email design.

Mobile email challenge 2: user behavior


If we knew exactly which of our subscribers use a mobile device to read our emails (and we knew which device and which software), then we could segment by "reading environment" and send appropriately-designed messages.

So people using old mobile phones might get plain text messages, iPhone users would get HTML-rich messages etc.

Challenge: we don't know this.

Then another layer of complication comes in because people use mobile email in different ways.

1. Many are reading email both on their mobile device and on the PC back home or in the office.

Challenge: If we send email that looks great on a mobile device (for example text-only emails), then these emails are under-optimized when viewed on a PC.

2. Some are using their mobile browser to read webmail.

Challenge: Even email sent to a webmail address may be appearing on a small mobile screen.

3. Some use their mobile email for triage: dealing with urgent messages on their mobile, deleting the rubbish and saving the rest to view later on the PC.

Challenge: how do we ensure our emails survive the triage process?

4. Some will sometimes open and act on marketing email on their mobile device and not save it for later. The distinctions between smartphone, netbook and PC are becoming blurred. Nokia already refers to its newest N97 "smartphone" as "the world's most advanced mobile computer".

Challenge: how do we ensure the whole email/landing page experience works for these mobile users?

5. Some will only use their mobile device for all their email (as explained by Morgan Stewart here).

Challenge: Mobile-only email addresses may reflect specific demographics or be subject to special anti-spam regulations.

But the fun doesn't end there. Let's add in a third layer of complexity: people's habits in terms of why, when and how they use email and the wider Internet change as they gravitate to mobile use.

Aaargghhhh!

Just how do we make sense of that mess?

Can we make sense of it?

Find out in Part 2

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[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | June 19, 2009 | 0 comment(s) - add yours!
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