If You Use E-mail as part of your promotional campaigns, you’re probably already checking to make sure that your messages get delivered. You may also be working with your service provider to detect their open rate. And you’re probably designing and processing e-mail to get it past ISPs’ spam filters and out of recipients’ junk folders.
That’s great. But do you know where consumers are reading your messages?
If not, you should find out. As Web-enabled smartphones make their way deeper into the U.S. market, the odds will only increase that your customers will see your message on a mobile device rather than a desktop or laptop computer. And that mobile setting can affect how the message displays, what options it offers for interaction, and how effective it is as a marketing element.
What’s likely to lead people to e-mail on the go? In a word, the iPhone and other devices that can reach the Web relatively comfortably and quickly.
“I don’t like using the overused phrase ‘game changer,’ but in this case it might just be true,” says Cindy Krum, a senior analyst and mobile marketing expert with digital agency Blue Moon Works. “The iPhone has reset the bar. Until its introduction, we were all acting as if there were two Webs, the desktop one and the mobile one. Now, largely because of the iPhone, you need to make sure that everything that works on your computer can also work on a mobile phone — including e-mail.”
Right now, of course, the majority of consumers access their e-mail from a standard computer-based browser. But that status quo may not apply if your target buyer is part of a high-mobile-usage segment. Research cited in July 2007 by MarketingSherpa suggests that about 64% of key decision makers first encounter an e-mail message over a mobile device. So if your marketing involves reaching C-level executives, you may benefit from optimizing your e-mail campaigns for mobile.
Research also suggests that mobile e-mail users skew younger than traditional e-mail readers, and that many of them are so accustomed to their mobile devices that they use them for e-mail even when they’re home and presumably near a broadband computer. Again, advertisers who want to push communications to 18- to 44-year-old Gen X’ers may find they’re doing so on a smartphone. That’s especially true for users who are likely to be on the go, from young parents and college students to travelers.
With that in mind, what do you need to do to get your e-mail the best mobile reception?
First, try to determine how readers are choosing to read your messages. Do that in the simplest way possible: Ask them. Conduct a survey of your opt-in e-mail recipients to learn what devices they’re using. Or include a check-off box in the opt-in product that lets them indicate a preference for mobile reading. Many e-mail service providers and Web analytics programs can also detect what software visitors are using for access. If you see a lot of Windows Mobile usage, for example, you may want to develop a mobile e-mail strategy.
Don’t be surprised if you find consumers doing both, says Krum. “People want flexibility and options,” she says. So it makes sense to adopt measures such as designing your marketing e-mails in the multipart MIME standard. Many mobile phones render e-mail as text-only messages. Using MIME ensures that they will at least look readable and right in that format.
But marketers taking aim at on-the-go readers must also recognize that mobile e-mail has different rules. For one thing, smaller screens mean shorter subject lines: approximately 20 characters rather than the 30 to 45 in PC-based e-mail readers. That’s not a lot of room in which to squeeze a memorable and compelling value proposition that can drive opens.
And since at least some mobile e-mail clients don’t render a “From” line, marketers also need to cram their brand identity into that subject line. As in PC-based e-mail, consumers are much more likely to open a message that comes from a brand they trust. So find a way to win that confidence by getting your brand in the subject line and, again, high up in the message body.
Speaking of compelling, Krum recommends offering mobile readers the option to click a “display all” link to a Web version of the message high up in the body copy. That will give them access to images, which many mobile e-mail clients block by default. In some cases, mobile carriers’ proxy servers also impose limits on per-message downloads that can wipe out images.
Image-based mobile e-mail and other rich media experiences may become easier to broadcast by next year or even later this year, Krum says. But for now, marketers need to work with some odd constraints on using graphics in mobile e-mail. For example, images within standard e-mail are often “sliced up” and sent in sections because it’s easier to download four files of 4k than one 20k file. On a PC, those files recombine properly into an image. But a mobile e-mail client is just as likely to receive them stacked one on top of another in a graphic hash.
“At the least, marketers need to make sure that any text in an image that needs to stay together gets cordoned in the same section,” Krum says. “Otherwise, your ‘Free through Sunday’ banner will not be readable.”
Mobile text e-mail should also get the value proposition and call to action out to recipients quickly. “People don’t like to scroll on a handheld device, so marketers need to work fast,” Krum points out. “Sometimes you’ll see a mobile e-mail with a strong subject line, but open it and there’s nothing up top but a bunch of links. Remember, you’ve got a whole new fold in mobile e-mail, and it’s higher than on a PC. So you’re working with less room, and you have to produce your offer quickly.”
And it may be only one offer, because mobile screens have less room both top to bottom and side and side: usually 120 pixels across, compared to 600 on a standard e-mail. For marketers who tend to load multiple discounts, coupons, promotions and value offers into single e-mail messages, that enforced brevity may be a good argument for developing a separate strategy for mobile readers.
When you think you’ve got that e-mail message in a shape that will work well on a wide range of mobile devices, Krum has one final tip: “Test the hell out of it.” Send it out to a dozen people in your office.
Getting a number of people to open it, using their different handsets and devices, is an unassailable reality check on how well you’ve optimized for the broad spectrum of mobile hardware-software combinations. It can be even more effective than the online simulators some service providers offer to predict how a given phone type will render a given message.
“I love it when people in our office get new phones because it means new ways to test messages,” Krum says. “I’ve seen occasions when the online simulator for my phone type produces a different result than the same message sent to my phone in the real world.”
Using friends and colleagues as guinea pigs may seem like a ragtag way to spot-check a mobile e-mail blast. “But when the rubber meets the road, it’s how the message renders on phones that matters, not its appearance on a computer simulator,” says Krum.
