I was looking at some statistics and reports recently and it really got me thinking about the implications that it could have on the email marketing industry.  In the next couple of posts, I will be looking at two of the biggest factors that may very well shape the email marketing world for the future.

According to facebook, a quarter of their users access their accounts through mobile phone devices and are twice as active as regular users.

The figures have risen from 5 million users in 2008 (source) to 150 million in 2010 (source) with 50 million of those new users coming in the last 6 months.  This, it seems is just the beginning.  With Android software being open to all phone manufacturers, there is a flood of affordable Smartphone devices coming into the market leaving these figures undoubtedly rising further.

In a presentation earlier in the year, Mary Meeker, head of global technology research at Morgan Stanley, forecast that mobile browsing would surpass desktop browsing within the next 5 years.

So what does this have to do with email marketing?  Well, if there is an increase in mobile usage, there will be a drop in actual PC/Laptop usage times.  That drop in usage I attribute to the casual Internet user.  The main goal when they usually log on is to have a quick check of their Social Networking, Email, and one or two select other sites that they will always visit.  Ultimately though, their agenda isn’t more than that.

In the past, a good number of these may actually end up aimlessly surfing the Internet for a long period of time as they have no real purpose to the session – a point where they would be more susceptible to marketing messages and exploring around the site and beyond their original intentions.

With mobile users, if they are intending to search for an item to buy, they will be more specific in their searches.  You will see browsing times drop, due to a lack of browser capability compared to desktop browsers.

Research from late last year also backs up this claim, stating that “60% of consumers have encountered a problem when accessing a website from their mobile phone during the past 12 months”. 

The main factors that caused this are:

• Slow load times (73%)
• Experiencing errors and crashes on the mobile site (51%)
• Formatting of the mobile site makes it difficult to use (48%)
• Mobile site not functioning as expected (45%)

With no unlimited amount of tabs and browsers running simultaneously, users would get frustrated trying to mimic their actions on a desktop browser, so their habits will consequently be different.

This does though, throw up opportunities for email marketers; ones that are already in place.

Recipients more tuned in?

Whilst the mobile browser will have a decrease in ability to browse, this also decreases the amount of things they can be doing at the same time.  This could lead to users paying more attention to your message than before, as long as it is readable and you have got your timing right….

For more on mobile email design, check out this style campaign blog, a great resource for design ideas.

Landing Pages

If the mobile browser user experience is an issue in conversion rates, then it is a marketers duty to ensure that this problem is limited as much as possible.  Landing pages optimised to mobile browsing is the best available solution, and so should be considered in the planning process.  Furthermore, sites that retain their customers details such as billing and delivery addresses being automatically loaded after the user supplies email address and password, will also help in limiting the users poor browsing experience.

The importance of timing

With mobile email marketing, you are potentially plugged into contacting them all the time.  The timing of when they will be receptive though will differ to that of a send to a desktop recipient.

Maybe your mobile recipients are on the train home from work and with not much else to do, will pay much more attention to your message than at any other point.

On the other hand, you could catch them out with friends, and if the email is not relevant it could be instantly dismissed.

Timing will be incredibly important and something that will have to be tested to get the most out of your campaigns.

If we’re looking to the future, I can envisage the sending process of email marketing evolving to be more intuitive to each subscriber; more of an advanced trigger mechanism based on  the subscriber’s past history opposed to a bulk send, which is the usual way to carry out an email campaign now.

Less is More

If we’re going to look at the best way to achieve success from mobile recipients, we are going to be looking at shorter email campaigns, with straight to the point content.

Indeed, Mary Meeker in her presentation even notes that “One of the implications of mobile access is a growth in ecommerce, featuring things such as location-based services, time-based offers, mobile coupons, push notifications, etc.”

Coupons, location specific and time limited offers could be a lot more effective with mobile marketing, catching people on the move and enticing them into your store, bar, restaurant, event etc.

Less may also mean more in the case of sending frequency, with a useful statistic drawn from the comprehensive guide on mobile email over on Mark Brownlow’s blog post (well worth a read) that stated “mobile email users less tolerant of higher-frequency emails than “traditional” email users”.  Although I personally believe that this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case and that this is drawn from people receiving desktop emails to their mobile devices; I’ll be going more into frequency strategies in my next post.

Images keep going really big when I preview it to myself

This is something that happens to a lot of people and can be very easily fixed.

The chances are you are using Outlook 2007 as your email client, and that uses a different rendering engine to other desktop and web-based clients and affects people who have used the image resizing tool within their campaign to get their images to the right size.

When the email is sent to Outlook 2007, the client removes the code that resizes the image and leaves it in its original (and normally huge) state; making your campaign look ugly, and unprofessional.

The Solution: Images need to be uploaded to mailingmanager in their desired size to prevent this from happening.  A major hurdle for a lot of people with this is that they don’t have the software to do this.  Luckily, we at mailingmanager have found a great, free bit of software for you to use.  View the tool on CNET and download it and remove this problem from ever happening again.

Are you a Mac user?  Try this app from the Apple site.

The email keeps doing weird things after I’ve saved it (content disappearing, layout moving around, text changing font and size)

This is a very common problem we hear and some poor people keep struggling through it, re-doing the campaign again, only to find it reoccur after saving again.

The problem is down to copying and pasting from Microsoft Word, email, or from any word processing software that defines the font type and size.  The reason it causes this problem is because it doesn’t use html code to change the font format and instead uses code that WYSIWYG html editors can’t read and display correctly.  The result is that the WYSIWYG, in its attempt to make sense of the unrecognised code, will break and distort the email causing erratic (and sometimes drastic) changes to the email, leaving your shouting profanities at the screen!

The Solution: Never, ever copy and paste from Microsoft Word, Publisher, Outlook, or any other word processing program that can alter font formatting.  You have two options really:

Either type directly into the editor or, alternatively if you want to copy and paste from an existing document, paste it into the Notepad prior to pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor and then you will not bring any dodgy coding over with it.

The Email keeps expanding in size when I…

….put links in

We’ve seen this enough times for this to be mentioned as advisory to not do.  A lot of times people will put in a link such as:

http://www.mailingmanager.co.uk/reallylongurl/inasubsectionofthesite/reallylongpagename.html

This will be inserted into the email how it is above.  The problem with doing this is that the link will not split onto two lines and will instead just continue on the same line, causing it to push out the size of your email, and make it lose its desired shape.

The Solution: The link needs to be put into a hyperlink to stop this problem from happening.  Just have it inserted behind wording such as “view the rest of this article” or “read more” and you will remove this problem.

….put images in

You may have taken our advice above and resized the images to your desired size and then gone to insert it, only to find that when you do insert it, it pushes out the width of the email.

The Solution: It is a pretty simple one; the image is too big.  The reason this is included is because people normally do the whole campaign before realising this mistake.

When they look at it though, they normally see the image as having space on either side of it, making them presume that it can’t be the image causing the problem.  What they sometimes miss is that most tables have a padding value in it that makes the images and text not touch the sides to give it a nice overall look.  You can reduce the padding if you want the image to fit, but we personally recommend shrinking that image a little bit more.

These are our most common issues that we receive.  If you keep having a recurring issue that you want solving, please post a comment below or email support@mailingmanager.co.uk with the problem and we will give you the solution.

Here are some of the most important dates for the Summer. We thought we’d provide them for you so you can plan ahead and see if you can tie in any email campaigns to it.

June 2010 Holidays and Events

• June 10 (Thursday) Isle of Wight Festival (through June 13)
• June 11 (Friday) Rockness Festival (Scotland) (through June 13)
• June 11 (Friday) Download Festival (England) (Through June 13)
• June 11 (Friday), 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa, Match Schedule (Final Match in Johannesburg, through July 11)
• June 16 (Wednesday) GoodFood Show (England) (through June 20)
• June 20 (Sunday), Father’s Day
• June 21 (Monday), Wimbledon 2010 (through July 4)
• June 23 Glastonbury Festival (through June 27)

July 2010 Holidays and Events

• July 1 (Thursday), Canada Day (Canada)
• July 4 (Sunday), Independence Day (U.S.)
• July 6 (Tuesday), Running of the Bulls in Pamplona (through July 14)
• July 9 (Friday) T In the Park (England) (through 11 July)
• July 11 (Sunday), British Open 2010 (St. Andrews, Scotland, through July 18)
• July 13 (Tuesday), 2009 MLB All Star Game (Angel Stadium, Los Angeles)
• July 14 (Wednesday), Bastille Day (France)
• July 15 (Thursday) Benicassim Festival (Spain) (through June 19)
• July 16 (Friday) The Proms 2010 (UK) (through September 11)

August 2010 Holidays and Events

• August 15 (Sunday) Ferragosto, (Italy)
• August 11 (Wednesday), Ramadan (begins at sunset the previous day, through September 10)
• August 21 & 22 (Sat & Sun) V Festival (England)
• August 27 (Friday) Reading & Leeds Festival (England)(Through 29 August)
• August 30 (Monday), Summer Bank Holiday (UK, Ireland)

September 2010 Holidays and Events

• September 5 (Sunday), Father’s Day (Australia, New Zealand)
• September 6 (Monday), Labor Day (U.S.)
• September 6 (Monday), Labour Day (Canada)
• September 9 (Thursday), Rosh Hashanah (begins at sundown the previous day)
• Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15-October 15 (U.S.)
• September 18 (Monday), Oktoberfest, Munich, Germany (ends Oct 3)
• September 18 (Saturday), Yom Kippur (begins at sundown the previous day)
• September 24 (Friday), La Mercé (Barcelona, Spain)

Information gathered from About.com

The way company’s carry out direct marketing has started to change over the past few years.  There are obviously still a lot of companies that consider direct marketing to be sending brochures and offers to a mailing list, either via snail mail or email (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’ll come to that point in another post).

The more socially aware marketer though, will be portraying more of a company personality in their communications.  As mentioned in my previous post, with email reputation monitors now judging on user interaction with your messages, it would favour you to portray your company personality as approachable and responsive.

A great way to do this is to use Social Media sites such as Twitter or Facebook.  These accounts you can use on a daily basis, and keep in touch with your followers, which should consequently boost your emails response rates, and success.

Your company personality should be considered carefully though.  It’s something that can win customer loyalty, but carried out incorrectly it can have the reverse effect.

Take a look at the Fly53 Twitter account and you will see that they are quite open and talkative – they don’t just offer away special offers but talk with their followers on a very basic level of anything that interests them.  This approach can work for a company like them as their target market wouldn’t consider this unprofessional.

But something like the BAE Systems Twitter account could never take that approach as its purpose is to update business clients on latest developments.  Entering into general conversation would be considered unprofessional.

Considering your organisations profile and ensure that your social and email personality is an extension of that profile is the key to a successful online marketing campaign.

Also, making sure you know your customers and what they want will help in shaping the integration of your social and email campaigns; something that I will go into detail in my next post.