I personally know that I receive a lot of marketing emails and do read a good majority of them on my mobile.  I will see products that I like and am interested in knowing more about, but I’m not about to go through the hassle of searching for a product online with my mobile – I normally just say that I’ll look at it later on and then forget about it.

I’m pretty sure I can say with confidence that I’m not the only one who does this and it must be having a detrimental effect on a good proportion of businesses email campaigns.

Using triggered emails though may very well help to combat this problem by allowing the user to ask for more information on a certain item or just the whole newsletter at a different time.

Simple links like “send me more about this later” could be placed underneath each product and then you specify a time delay that will hopefully catch them at a more receptive time.

Alternatively, having a link up at the top of the email asking for a reminder later on or actually giving options on when they want to receive the email again may also help you from losing your recipients to being put off from purchasing on a mobile.

There is of course a challenge to this.  We as email marketers are suddenly faced with inserting a myriad of links to cater for all our recipients situations.  Would it be too much? Thoughtful designing would have to come into play to make sure that the look of your email isn’t being compromised.

It is something that could be dropped into the design though opposed to the little links at the top as the benefits can be further reaching than just mobile users.  Most recipients won’t go through the process of purchasing items at work so they could then set themselves a preferred time to receive the email with triggers used this way.

Do you think that you’ve lost customers to mobile emails?  This might be a viable solution to you; there’s only one way to find out though – test, test, test….

So what does that mean to us?  Well, to start with email marketers are going to have to consider mobile email marketing a bit more than previously.  I had already outlined in a previous post that b2b email marketers would have to consider mobile marketing a bit sooner than b2c orientated companies, but now that seems to be shifting somewhat.  If it turns out that IMAP accounts prove popular with customers, you will be sure that the other leading email providers (hotmail, yahoo) will follow suit.   

You must then consider that your message will now only get read once by mobile users, and that they may not read your email on a pc as your email will already be marked as read.   Your email design will have to change somewhat to cater for this quickly expanding area. It will be worth your while to set up your own Google account so that you can see what your message will look like on mobiles.   

Obviously that brings you back to one of the longest running debates in email marketing, HTML design vs Text.  If you’re considering mobile marketing it may be more tempting to move towards text as not only does your message render well in the recipients screen but it would also skip a lot of spam filter checking meaning a higher delivery into inboxes.  I don’t believe this is the answer though.  Successful email marketing campaigns evolve around differentiating yourself from the competition, and however interesting your subject matter may be, users will switch off if every promotional email they read is in a text format.  I’m already an advocate of the HTML light (30% image, 70% text) method of email design and believe that email marketers should work around that still as recipients will still read the majority of campaigns on their pc. 

So how can we cater for this market without sacrificing our whole design strategy?  My personal thought is to start to heavily concentrate on list segmentation.  For instance, if you placed all your Google recipients into a sub group you could then alter your main campaign to render well for mobile devices.  This would of course mean a bit more work, but who’s scared of that when the chances of extra revenue increase?   

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk