Mobile email: smartphone numbers and market share

After flattering to deceive for so long, the mobile web appears to have finally arrived. Thanks in large part to the iPhone.

And with it comes mobile email. For example:

• An October 2009 report from the Radicati Group suggested there were 139 million mobile email users in 2009. It predicts this number to rise to over 1 billion mailboxes by the end of 2013.
• The 2009 Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index revealed that 36% of Australian mobile phone users had accessed email via their phone.

The associated challenge for email marketers is not what it once was.

We used to panic about cumbersome mobile email software with HTML allergies, but this issue is receding as email users continue to gravitate to smartphones. Indeed, there is some suggestion that it’s the spread of smartphones that is driving the growth of mobile email.

A mid-2009 channel preference survey by ExactTarget found that smartphone owners were over 50% more likely to have increased their use of email in the previous 6 months.

ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart noted, for example, that:

…we are seeing a reversal of the trend of waning email use among college students, specifically because of smartphone adoption.

I believe there are two big challenges ahead.

Mobile email design is one, but not design for mobile devices per se, since the iPad, netbooks etc. do a pretty good job with displaying HTML email.

Not design for those mobile phones with poor handling of HTML email, either, since people who want and use mobile email will migrate to smartphones.

The design challenge is a halfway house between the two: design for smartphones. They are smaller and less robust in how they handle email when compared with a netbook, but a lot simpler to master than the mobile phone disasters of the past.

The second challenge is adjusting strategies and tactics when you know people are reading your emails away from the office or home PC.

I’ll explore current thinking on both issues next week, but by way of introduction, I’ve compiled a set of statistics on just how popular smartphones are now and will become. And just which smartphones are dominating the market, the mobile web and mobile email.

You’ll find all those statistics and their sources here.

The numbers are important because they alert us to the potential scale of mobile email use in the coming months and years.

If you thought mobile email was a minority pastime yet to be considered for the Olympic marketing games, then check these numbers for evidence to the contrary.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Mobile email

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