Smoothing Out the Mobile Email Journey
The increase in the number of emails being read on mobile devices is creating significant challenges for subscribers as they make the journey from receiving an email to interacting with content on email landing pages. Retailers have not only been slow to embrace mobile email design, their move to a mobile mind-set for their emails and websites are significantly out of sync, creating instances when subscribers go from a mobile-friendly environment to an mobile-unfriendly one, and vice versa.
In early June, the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud conducted observational research that looked at how mobile friendly the emails and email landing pages were for approximately 160 B-to-C brands using anonymous email accounts. We found many opportunities for brands to provide a more consistent experience for their subscribers — and some of these findings were truly surprising.
Forty-one percent of brands send mobile-friendly emails, using either responsive or mobile-aware design techniques. That's up from just 22 percent in October 2013, but still a long way to go to catch up with consumers, who are reading the majority of emails on mobile devices at this point.
There's also a long way to go to catch up with brands’ websites, which are doing a much better job of adapting to consumers’ mobile habits. We found that 75 percent of brands use mobile-friendly landing pages for the primary calls to action in their emails. I previously thought that website development might have been holding back investments in creating mobile-friendly emails, but that's not the case.
Another surprising finding was that 40 percent of brands using mobile-friendly landing pages send mobile-friendly emails — a percentage that's actually slightly less than the overall adoption rate of 41 percent. So while you'd expect that brands with mobile-friendly landing pages should be more likely to send mobile-friendly emails, they're not.
While in most cases brands’ websites are more mobile friendly than their emails, it's the reverse with the heaviest users of email marketing. Among brands that send their subscribers at least one promotional email a day, 73 percent of them send mobile-friendly emails, which is more than double the adoption rate of their lower-volume peers. However, only 67 percent of brands that email at least daily use mobile-friendly landing pages, which puts them significantly below the overall 75 percent adoption rate.
Wherever you look, there are sizable disconnects between email and website mobile friendliness. That's a serious risk because consumers react harshly when they encounter either. They tune out or unsubscribe from emails that aren't mobile friendly, and tend not to return to websites that don't render well on mobile devices.
Therefore, if you're among the 55 percent of brands with either mobile-friendly emails or mobile-friendly landing pages, it's time to sync up those two elements so subscribers can enjoy a smooth and consistent journey from email to website. Work on it this summer and early fall so you're ready when the holiday season arrives.
Chad White is the lead research analyst at the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, and author of "Email Marketing Rules."
Chad S. White is the author of "Email Marketing Rules" and research director at Litmus, which provides email teams with powerful tools for email creation, testing, analytics, and collaboration. He has written more than 3,000 posts and articles about email marketing trends and best practices. A former journalist, Chad previously served as lead email marketing researcher at Salesforce.com, ExactTarget, Responsys, and the Direct Marketing Association.