The mobile email intersection Point is here!

Well, it happened. As predicted – at 49% of all opens, email mobile opens have reached the intersection point with desktops thanks to another 5% growth over the last quarter (not to mention a +5% growth in the quarter previous as well!).

We could now even say that email marketing is mobile marketing and vice versa. Let’s dig into the mobile email statistics a bit deeper.

All sectors see equal mobile email growth

As it turns out, growth isn’t sector-specific. We measured 3 different sectors (Financial, Telco, and Retail) to see if growth was occurring at different rates in different sectors, but our results showed a growth of 5% in each individual sector. Telco maintains the highest proportion, surpassing desktops at 51%.

Think mobile first

It was important before we reached this intersection point, but now it’s absolutely critical that email marketers think “mobile-first” when planning email campaigns. That doesn’t mean throw out your desktop versions; it just means, consider the mobile audience along with your desktop audience. Go scalable or even shinier, responsive and provide your audience with better experiences for their email.

What About clicks on mobile vs Desktop?

Mobile opens are going up again; we can all agree that it’s not just going to stop at around 50%. We wanted to see how this growth in mobile opens was affecting clicks. We looked at where users were clicking first if they opened an email on both mobile and desktop. As it turns out, 62% of first clicks are occurring on desktop devices.

We wondered why clicks on mobile devices would be so disproportionate to open rates and came up with some hypotheses:

• Mobile readers may just scan for content quickly and decide later to actually revisit the offers and click through
• Though 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices, email marketers may still be sending desktop version of emails, making it more difficult for mobile readers to read and navigate, resulting in fewer first-clicks on mobile devices
• Mobile readers may be “click-shy” after having received non-mobile-optimized emails for so long now and they just expect a bad experience (i.e., desktop-friendly landing pages, long forms, tons of images, etc.)

What to do with mobile email?

Email marketers have to reconsider their campaigns to appease the growing number of people reading emails on mobile devices. Consider responsive or scalable emails, of course, but also think about:

• Reducing the number of CTA’s you send to mobile users; endless scrolling the length of an email might affect clicks; build in email marketing testing plans and see what works best
• Think of the whole mobile user experience for your campaigns; mobile users don’t want to pinch and zoom in on a web page, fill out 10 form fields on a landing page, or scroll through a bunch of images to read the offer; streamline emails, landing pages, and forms for mobile users

Don’t forget to craft an all inclusive mobile experience (including push marketing).
Mobile Apps and mobile push messaging should be connected for the quest to embrace the complete (mobile) customer journey. There are a lot of possibilities to use campaigns to increase mobile engagement think about elements of Gamification, Reviews and Loyalty notifications to upgrade that complete experience.

We made a complete infograhic on it. Click for a larger version.