This is an excerpt from our latest eBook, The Marketers Guide to Emails on Mobile. Download the full eBook here.
Emails are the easiest way to directly contact customers, users, and readers. They present an opportunity to place content directly in front of your audience at any time of the day or night. Unlike social and paid, where organic impressions have volatile ROI, email has been a reliable channel for all marketers trying to drive revenue and engagement. However, in the last 10 years, mobile has changed how consumers interact with these emails.
The majority of emails are now opened on mobile devices, so it’s paramount that marketers optimize for this shift in behavior. For instance, if your links still send users to the mobile web, when that user has your app installed, the user experience isn’t being optimized and revenue is being lost. Our estimate – based on partner data – says that businesses could be losing out on hundreds of thousands in revenue by not optimizing emails for the mobile shift. In this guide to mobile emails, we’ll break down the main problem behind why emails are so difficult to perfect on mobile, and present the solution for how to fix them.
The Importance of Email Marketing & Mobile Apps
1. Email marketing has the best ROI
Email marketing has traditionally had the best ROI of any marketing channel. On average, every dollar you spend on email has an ROI of $44, whereas other channels are less than half that.
2. Email is an integral piece of your omnichannel strategy
Every company with a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is covering the main customer touch points of email, ads, social, web, and organic search; along with viral growth which is powered by referrals or sharing. It can be a combination of those initiatives that finally convinces a user to sign up or make a purchase.
3. 69% of emails are opened on mobile devices
Many top brands have robust, and massive email lists that they use as part of their broader marketing strategy. Unfortunately, traditional email marketing is not sufficient anymore. Today, 70% of emails are opened on mobile devices and that share continues to trend upwards. Any successful email marketing strategy must take the mobile experience into account.
4. Why drive users to a mobile app?
Not only are users spending more of their digital time on mobile (the average user spends 4-5 hours per day on mobile), but also, when those users are in your app instead of your mobile website, they convert to purchase 3x more often. And users spend 18x more time in-app than on mobile sites.
That being said, if you are marketing to customers via email, you can drive the highest ROI by providing a seamless mobile experience that links users into your app.
The Problem
Fragmentation of the Email Channel on Mobile
1. Inconsistencies between different platforms, email clients, and devices
Once you decide to optimize your emails for mobile and mobile apps, you start to realize how many challenges mobile presents for email. Different platforms, email clients, and devices handle emails differently, and the way they handle emails can change at any moment. “Responsive” email design is stuck in the 2000s, where you have to use complicated nested div and table structures and inline styling (a taboo in contemporary web design) to make emails look good on mobile.