Ninety seven percent of consumers check their personal email account every day – but that’s not too surprising, is it? The newsworthy bit here is not our inability to live a day without email, but rather where and how we check our email. Are subscribers looking at your content on a desktop computer? A Retina display MacBook Pro? An Android phone? The device that a consumer uses to view your email determines whether content loads correctly and ultimately, whether they choose to keep reading or delete.
Earlier this year Eloqua released a study examining how email and mobile intertwine. According to the report, 57% of consumers accessed their personal email account from their mobile device. This mirrors a separate study from Return Path, which states that nearly 30% of all emails are opened on a mobile device.
But brands don’t seem to be keeping up with the mobile revolution. According to Email in Motion, 48% of marketers do not know how many mobile subscribers they have. Why is this a problem? The same Email In Motion study shows that 63% of Americans would close or delete an email not optimized for mobile. In short, if you’re not optimizing, you’re audience isn’t reading.
Here are a few tips for making the transition to mobile email marketing.
1. Find out how your emails are being viewed
First, take a look at the numbers behind your email campaign to see how people are opening your emails. There are easy ways to check this if you use a provider MailChimp or Constant Contact. A quick check on the back end of our email marketing system showed that a quarter of our audience read the last lonelybrand newsletter on a mobile device – a segment far too large to be neglected.
2. Include a plain-text version
The MailChimp Blog recommends that marketers include a plain text version of the email “because not all mobile devices display HTML properly.” Plain text can function as your backup in this situation.
3. Test It
Testing is vital for any email campaign, but no testing protocol is complete without a mobile component. How does that newsletter look on an iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry? With such a diversity of devices, it’s important to know whether your content loads properly on each.
How do you optimize your marketing emails for mobile? Share your favorite tricks with us below.
