Ignore mobile email at your peril

Recent research from ReturnPath suggests that mobile email open rates have increased by a massive 300% over the past two years, with more emails now opened on mobile devices than on traditional desktop computers. Clearly, marketers, agencies and affiliates are missing a trick by ignoring mobile email and so risking losing market share to their competition.

Yet despite this, few companies consider mobile email, choosing instead to employ a one-size-fits-all approach to their email marketing campaigns. By failing to take into account the many nuances of the mobile medium, as well as the significant shift in consumer behaviour that it has brought about, marketers run the risk of alienating their audiences and having their communications falling on deaf ears.

So what do today's marketers need to bear in mind in order to ensure ongoing success in the mobile email space?

Know your audience

A 2012 eConsultancy Email Marketing Industry Census shows that a massive 48% of marketers don't actually know what proportion of their emails are read on mobile devices. Your email campaign needs to resonate most strongly with the largest percentage of your audience, and this can only be achieved by understanding who they are, what devices they are using to read email, and how they interact and engage with these tools.

By tracking and analysing your email campaigns, and carefully assessing the percentage of mobile and desktop users engaging with your emails, you'll be far better placed to develop an effective campaign that resonates and drives conversions.

Optimise appearance and usability

According to BlueHornet's 2012 industry report, a staggering 70% of today's consumers immediately delete emails that don't render correctly on a mobile device. This is a frightening figure given that the majority of companies continue to pay little attention to mobile when constructing their email campaigns.

Poorly designed emails that make no provision for touch screen systems and various font and pixel limitations, are not only less likely to be opened, but also significantly less likely to result in click-throughs, sign-ups, purchases or other conversion metrics.

Consequently, it's vital that marketers start to incorporate responsive design into their email coding, to enable them to be automatically scaled for whichever device they are opened on. Simpler designs tend to work best, as these can be better applied across a range of handsets, regardless of the screen size and pixels available.

Build a user's journey

However, making the move to mobile email involves far more than simply optimising the appearance of email content for smartphone display. Email campaigns need to be appropriately tailored to the evolving needs of today's mobile consumers, taking into account all elements of the user journey so as to ensure effective conversion rates.

A well-designed mobile email can only be effective if its calls to action can be instantly and seamlessly answered, from the smartphone or tablet itself. Before constructing a mobile email campaign, marketers need to consider not only the appearance and functionality of the email itself, but also take into account the next steps in the user's journey.

Will calls to action still make sense in a mobile context? Will click-through links take users to mobile-friendly landing pages? Can your consumer purchase your product or sign-up for your service directly from their phone?

It's vital that marketers consider the user's journey to ensure continuity in terms of goal completion across each platform. The growing trend towards mobile is largely driven by convenience, and mobile email campaigns need to be developed with this in mind, removing conversion barriers where possible.

By developing an intuitive mobile email campaign, which effectively anticipates consumer behaviour patterns, you'll be able to connect with an ever-growing mobile audience like never before, and turn your customer communications into successful conversion tools.