The smartphone is a new ingredient in the mobile mix, offering email marketers a powerful platform to engage with customers as never before, using rich content including video and images targeted to their specific needs. People can now get the emails they want, in a form that they appreciate, on the products they like, whenever and wherever they are.
But with such a powerful marketing tool comes increased responsibility to ensure you get your campaigns right – a campaign can appear spectacularly off pace if marketers aren’t intelligent about smartphones. Whilst mobile might not be new, the smartphone is, and this requires a new level of understanding. The mobile picture is a complex one, full of pitfalls for the uninitiated, but specialist know-how can bring the clarity needed to deliver a real return on investment
Why mobile matters for marketers
In the late 1990s, the Internet was born and in less than two decades online sales have grown beyond our wildest dreams: research from Forrester suggests that e-commerce will hit $335 billion in the US in 2012; and in the UK IMRG reports that Britons spend £5.5 billion online in September 2011 alone, up 15% on 2010.
Alongside the internet came email; today it’s estimated that close to 300 billion emails are sent every day. Research from the Radicati Group suggests that the number of email accounts globally will rise from 2.9 billion in 2010 to 3.8 billion by 2014.
Smartphones will undoubtedly do for m-commerce what the internet did for e-commerce, so marketers cannot ignore this channel when it comes to addressing your key audiences:
- research from YouGov suggests that Smartphone penetration amongst British users currently stands at 33%
- mobileSQUARED predicts that mobile penetration will hit 100% by 2015
- PayPal estimates that m-commerce transaction revenue will rise from £438m to a huge £2.6bn by 2016.
This growth and the huge potential for more in the short, medium and long-term is driven by the fact that mobile is so personal. Along with money and keys, it’s the first thing we reach for when leaving the house. It’s this intimacy and portability that offers real opportunities to convert our communications into transactions.
Email is the ideal medium to help drive this conversion. Whilst we most commonly associate email with a PC, Ofcom found that around 40% of people check their personal email via their phone, with half of this number checking it at least once a day. For the marketer, this represents a huge opportunity, not only to reach target customers but to prompt engagement. Data from Econsultancy, however, shows that only 14% of organisations currently optimise their email for mobile devices, which is unfortunate because investment in this area can deliver open rates above 50% and a click-through rate of between 25-30%.
The business landscape is littered with monuments to companies and business models that failed to understand the implications of the Internet fast enough. Ignoring the growth of mobile, and ways to optimise email to take advantage of it, could prove equally as disastrous.
It’s clear that mobile will change email marketing profoundly and forever. The tendency here is to focus on the new tools available through this channel; location-based marketing and QR codes as a prime example. What marketers really need to address are the real changes that smartphone ownership makes and address marketing needs accordingly. Ensuring that your organisation understands and adheres to three basic principles can ensure that it’s a change for the better.
1. Understanding the device
Smartphones and tablets can pack powerful dual core processors, cutting-edge graphic capabilities, location-based technologies and most of the other functions of a desktop. But it would be a huge mistake to see them as a PC that’s shrunk in the wash. Most PCs largely run on two main operating systems and a couple of prominent browsers, meaning emails can be standardised and so behave predictably. Unfortunately, there are a plethora of mobile types and OS that mean there are many variables that can result in a marketing email that works beautifully on your laptop turning into something very ugly on your smartphone.
Older mobiles simply can’t keep up with their modern counterparts, so sending customers emails that are optimised for the latest smartphone will be a fairly pointless exercise.
There’s huge diversity within the smartphone market – manufacturers such as Apple, BlackBerry, Nokia and Samsung, for example, all use different operating systems. Each OS behaves differently and, consequently, if your email is not optimised for the OS it’s sent to, it won’t look the way you intended it to, while functionality such as links and video may not work at all.
This is further complicated by the fact that the mobile OS picture is changing all the time, meaning that marketers have to consider all options if they are going to reach and influence their intended audience.
| Operating System | Market Share – June 2010 | Market share – June 2011 |
| Symbian | 32% | 10% |
| Apple | 30% | 18% |
| BlackBerry | 20% | 22% |
| Android | 10% | 45% |
( Source: Kantar)
If you’ve spent a big part of your marketing budget creating a beautiful, fully functional email with embedded video that’s optimised for Apple’s iPhone, but 75% of your customers are using phones running on Android and BlackBerry OS, then most of that budget is going to be wasted on badly rendered emails that fail to engage your customers.
And finally, the desktop and mobile user interfaces are diverging, with the former sticking doggedly to the keyboard/mouse format and the latter embracing touch screen technology. This new diversity means that a one-size-fits-all email solution for both desktop and mobile devices is no longer a viable option.
2. Understanding the options
So, if we’re to ensure that every email behaves the way it’s intended to behave, we need a different approach for the full range of devices. We have to face the fact that today, no single mobile email solution is perfect, but mixing and matching three main approaches can help marketers get the results they need.
Approach 1 – Generate a mobile hosted version of a desktop email. The benefits are that it is a universal solution and will work with all smartphones. The cons, however, are that the user will need to request this version by clicking a link and so the default view is not optimised for mobile.
Approach 2 – Generate an automatic mobile-optimised email using coding. The pros are that this is the ‘all singing, all dancing’ option where full functionality, including striking graphics and video, for example, is specifically designed for the customer’s mobile device. The cons are that, to date, it only works on Android or Apple operating systems, so based on current market share a third of all smartphone users will not be able to enjoy the proper rendering.
Approach 3 – A data-driven solution, where data taken from device tracking is used to dynamically segment users who have used/use their mobiles to read emails. We then target them with a specific mobile version designed for their individual handset.
3. Understanding your audience
Finally, and critically, if we’re going to get the mix of these approaches right, we need to know which customers are using what phone/OS – and the content they would like to receive. This demands sophisticated tracking and the acquisition of data, which will help you deliver real returns.
This is tremendously useful as it can save money in terms of not sending ‘wasted’ emails and also helps to cut down on customers receiving badly rendered communications. Making sure that a potential customer receives an email that works on their device is a powerful message in its own right, implying that the company cares enough to make the effort – a badly rendered email is, unfortunately, likely to generate the opposite response.
Tracking mobile data can be used as part of a multi-channel strategy, incorporating websites and social media for example. Accurate mobile data allows companies to maximise the insights they have on customer behaviour and build a more detailed understanding of target customers. It adds another layer of detail, allowing us to get closer to the elusive ‘single view’ of the customer as an individual. To achieve this, businesses need to see the bigger picture – to cross-reference sales across their service channels, to work out which customers are most likely to spend money and who’s buying through which media.
Campaigns will only ever be as good as the data they’re built on. By harnessing tracking and analytics, and devising a strategy to use this information effectively, your emails will go to the right people, in the right format and contain the information they want and need to make better purchasing decisions.
