Email marketing is a great way of increasing traffic to your website and keeping your audience informed about your product and services. People are increasingly opening emails on their mobile devices over desktop, though, and this is important for internet marketers to take note of. Watch today's Daily Brown Bag to learn about the statistics that prove emails are increasingly being opened on mobile devices, and tips on how to get your email marketing ready for mobile.
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello and welcome to the Daily Brown Bag. Today we're going to be talking about getting your email ready for mobile email marketing. I'm Chad Hill and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.
Hey, good afternoon, Chad and welcome to the Brown Bag. Yeah, we're talking about mobile-friendly emails, and this is something that we've talked about before. We did a Brown Bag, I guess, back in November, and there's some new data out that we want to cover. More and more people are opening their email from their devices instead of their desktops, something we noted in 2013, and the trend is definitely continuing in 2014. Movable Ink just recently released it's 2014 US Consumer Device Preference Report. This is coming out with first quarter data that's got some interesting stats in here, relevant to our mobile email marketing topic.
Most notable one is that 66% of emails were opened on a mobile device. It's a pretty stunning number, 66%. 47% of those were on smartphones, 19% were on tablets. And iPhones were the big winner here. It's worth noting that this was a US-only survey, so that may skew the data a little bit because we see the iPhone's penetration is a little bit higher in the US. 38% of email marketing was opened on an iPhone. And so, I guess, the question here is what should people be doing about this? One last thing to note, before we get into the implications, Chad, is what are the peek times for people opening mobile email marketing. It turns out to be before business hours in the morning for smartphones and for tablet owners, it turns out to be at night, between 8pm and 11pm. So, I think the discussion, today, is what does that mean for our internet marketing community?
Yeah, well, I think the first one is to make sure you realize the emails you are creating have to be readable on a small screen. So that means that you need to make sure your design is responsive. And responsive mobile email design is a little bit different than responsive web site design because most email clients are fairly limited in what they can do. So, you want to make your phone a little bigger, make sure your images can scale, and test it on mobile devices to optimize email open rate. The second thing you want to do is really make sure, focus on your subject line, because often times, again, you're dealing with less real estate, so don't waste the entire viewable area of your subject line with non-useful information. Make sure you're getting right to the point because people don't have a lot of space to see your message and your subject line. So, make it very to the point.
At the same time, when you do get into the email, remember the screen is much smaller, so keep your content brief, and do have click-throughs, ideally, back to a website that is also mobile-friendly, because, remember, if someone's coming through a mobile device to a website that's not mobile-friendly, you're going to have a higher bounce rate. And then, finally, you really, in this day and age, need to really think about building and curating your email marketing list, looking at stats like open rates, and trying to really get into how you can improve those stats and how you can build your email marketing list, because, as we've talked about many times, your email marketing list is a form of, an audience that you want to, obviously, take care of, nurture, and hopefully, one day, some of those people will either repeat business with you, or become a new customer.
Yeah, and that list is really important, Chad, and I know for our small business viewers struggle with that, both growing the list and with their open rates, and I think the path to getting a strong open rate is understanding the behavior and the stat that we opened with, the 66% of emails are now opened on a mobile device, should move you to take some action. So we'd like to hear your comments on this. Drop us a comment, a suggestion, we hope you'll subscribe to our YouTube channel and join us for a Brown Bag tomorrow.