“Ten years ago, email marketers could be nearly certain that the messages they sent would be received, opened and read on a desktop or laptop PC with a dedicated wired Ethernet connection to the internet,” begins Steve Dille in a commentary for Marketing Land. “Today, however, email messages are more likely to be opened and read on a smartphone than a PC.”
Dille knows that’s quite alright, but that there are also going to be some challenges.
“Marketers today have to consider an enormous number of factors when sending messages to customers and prospects,” he explains. “Not only do we need to think about mobile-optimizing our emails, but now we need to consider whether other mobile channels would be more appropriate for a given interaction: Would a text be more relevant? Mobile push notification?”
Of course, adapting to mobile isn’t an option anymore. Dille cites well-known tech industry analyst Mary Meeker, who recently released her Internet Trends report which showed just how quickly the internet is becoming a mobile environment.
Mobile usage as a percentage of total worldwide web usage reached 25 percent in May 2014 — that’s up from 14 percent in May of 2013 and from the less than 1 percent just five years ago.
In a word, opines Dille, “the overall business-to-consumer messaging experience today is best understood as primarily a mobile interaction.”
Dille’s company recently surveyed some major marketers and determined that the lion’s share are preparing for the shift to mobile. More details are available by reading the story.
In the meantime, however, Dille’s “nuggets of wisdom” that he thinks readers will find helpful are detailed here.
“The new reality in the mobile age is that interactions are becoming shorter, and people expect to have useful information presented to them in contextually useful ways — including email — when appropriate,” Dille advises. “This is the biggest factor in why marketers and engagement professionals need to get up to speed quickly on the power and potential of mobile messaging. And it’s also why marketers need to get serious about the new design techniques that optimize messages for mobile screens.”
