People are increasingly relying on their mobiles as a primary means of communication – be it for calls and texts, social media or email. According to research by digital agency Steel, more than a third of consumers (36%) read marketing emails on their mobile, rising to 55% among 18-34 year olds – a high proportion of the customer base for many marketers.
There’s no avoiding the fact that mobile growth, and in turn mobile innovation, is a hugely important trend – and one that marketers cannot afford to ignore. For many industries, particularly insurance where emails are traditionally optimised for desktops, the increasing number of people choosing to open emails on mobile devices presents a problem – if messages are not configured to display properly on mobiles, customers will quickly disengage with brands who communicate with them using this method.
For marketers, the real value lies in the varying capabilities and design of the individual handset and what this allows us to do from a creative perspective.
How mobile optimised email increases conversions and engagement – quotemehappy.com
Quotemehappy.com, a division of Aviva, is an insurer with a difference: it is based entirely online and with no phone numbers or physical stores, is able to offer customers highly competitive premiums. Quotemehappy.com caters to modern customers’ desire for an effective but low-maintenance relationship with their insurer. To deliver this, Quotemehappy.com needed to truly understand how their customers actually engaged with them.
As emails had been traditionally built for a desktop environment, usual campaigns often meant that more than a quarter of customers (28%) were receiving communications that may not have rendered seamlessly on mobile devices; blunting the effectiveness of engagement.
To drive deeper engagement with the large proportion of customers who open emails on their mobile phones, quotemehappy.com needed to first understand when and how this group interacted with marketing emails, and then correctly design their emails to ensure that they were optimised for mobile and easy to digest.
Quotemehappy.com worked with Experian Marketing Services to establish and incorporate mobile best practice guidelines. By doing this, Quotemehappy.com could start to treat and track mobile users separately; allowing them to isolate the ROI of their mobile users and identify what needed tweaking. The optimised mobile design mirrored the desktop version, but rearranged the displayed information to enhance the user experience, work perfectly, and deliver meaningful measurement:
- fonts were enlarged
- content focused on a single column
- ‘call to action’ made more prominent
- action buttons placed conveniently for ‘one thumb’ navigation
- interaction based on touch screen interfaces
- tracking to identify mobile devices
- transactional tagging – with the ability to measure sales generated from mobile email
By ensuring that they were catering for their customers using mobile devices, quotemehappy saw a nine percent increase in conversion rates on mobile – a very useful boost at a time when the finances of many consumers are at a stretch.
Top tips for mobile optimisation
Understand your audience – with smartphones on the rise, marketers must identify which devices your audience is using and prioritise your designs accordingly. Android and iOS share common solutions, whereas Blackberry will need a completely different design to provide a good mobile experience.
Tailor content as well as design – marketers need to understand that when a user engages with emails via their mobile, they have different objectives and priorities; tailor your content to ensure messaging is time –sensitive, including click-to-call enabled numbers and GPS look-up which makes your content instantly relevant.
Close the loop – ensure that mobile users are being directed to mobile content whenever possible. If mobile content is not available, try and redirect mobile users down a different conversion path such as click to call.
Evaluate and tweak – ensure you are measuring your mobile performance separately to your regular desktop performance. This will allow you to make the necessary changes to maximise ROI in a developing channel. Whilst streamlining your conversion process for desktop users may seem like old hat, the behaviour of mobile users means many marketers need to learn how best to cater for mobile needs. The same process on desktop may not necessarily work on mobile.
Preparing for a mobile future
With major handset launches already seen for 2013, it’s clear that mobile will continue to be crucial for marketers. To stay on top of these developments, marketers must ensure that they remain well abreast of the possibilities that these technologies offer, and more importantly how their customer base is interaction with them. Understanding consumer activity is the key to harnessing new technologies to communicate efficiently and in a fashion that is welcomed.
