You’ve got to hand it to the people at Reachmail. Their new infographic “Are You Losing Out?” pretty much hits the nail on the head in detailing why so many mobile email marketing campaigns today just don’t seem to get it.
Everyone and their mother wants to cash in on the mobile craze, and with good reason. One-fifth of Facebook’s total user base is mobile-only. Mobile commerce is expected to reach $37.44 billion for 2013 once everything is tabulated. And growth continues to be astronomical, with worldwide smartphone sales up more than 52 percent year-over-year for the second quarter of 2013. More people are using mobile and they’re doing it for everything under the sun, so it’s not something that can be considered a niche or specialized market anymore. At the very least, it’s a big chunk of consumer dollars, and in the future it may end up being the main way to reach people.
So why are so many businesses so bad at reaching and converting these people – especially when it comes to mobile email marketing? Reachmail has many of the answers.
No cohesion. Making something “mobile-friendly” isn’t just about a single email or even an entire campaign. To reach, convert, and keep mobile customers, you have to tailor every single message to their platform of choice. That means all of your correspondence should be easy for them to use, and if you’re directing them to your site, it had better be designed with a mobile audience in mind, too.
Ignoring parameters. Mobile devices are technologically different than regular computers, and quite often they’re different from each other, too. An image with text that looks great on a laptop might turn out awful on smartphones or even tablets because the pixel width is much lower. On top of this, you can’t just optimize for Android or iPhone and call it a day. Each platform makes up a relatively significant portion of the market, and ignoring those customers is tantamount to shrugging away millions in potential earnings.
Bad timing. If you’ve ever conducted an email campaign you should know this already, but some companies still don’t get it: you have to send your messages at the right time or they’ll be ignored. Plenty of studies exist. Look them up.
Pretending we’re a melting pot. Not all customers are the same – you need to cater your message to specific demographics if you want a good response. To do this, you first need to know who’s using the platform you’re targeting.
Make customers do heavy lifting. Devices with mobile internet are getting easier to use all the time, but they’re still not as fully-featured as traditional computers. Because of this, you have to think like a mobile user. Do away with large blocks of text, asking them to do lots of writing and clicking, and in general making it difficult for them to navigate and find what they’re looking for – this includes burying the call-to-action in the middle of a lot of text, other links, or putting it at the bottom. People don’t want to wait!
See how Reachmail backs these findings up with cold, hard stats below.
