It’s been estimated that a majority of consumers will view their emails exclusively on mobile phones by the year 2014. Now this doesn’t mean that PCs or laptops are soon to become obsolete, it just means that email marketers have a limited time to get their mobile email strategy in place. Be sure to take a look at your web analytics tool and discover which phones are being used, so that you can best target the needs of your audience.
If your customers aren’t quite up to speed on mobile technology, now is a good time to start introducing it to them! Give your customers the option to view their emails on their phone by placing a link to a mobile version of your email. This version can be created in a couple of different formats – either as hosted plain text or a smaller, scaled down version of the email. You might choose to display your email in plain text if you are unable to get your original email template to render properly in mobile phones. To do this, simply put the content of your email into text, host it on a server and include a link to it in your regular email template.
Another option to try is creating a mobile-friendly hosted version of your email and including a link to that. First, create a smaller version of your email using a standard mobile phone screen sizes. Check your web analytics tool to see what kind of mobile traffic you’re already getting. If you’re not sure, or not currently getting any, 320 x 480 pixels is a common screen size and should work well for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones.
Once you’ve determined the size of your mobile version email, you’ll need to scale down your original email template to fit into it. If there are multiple messages in your email, you may have to decide to condense the copy to your most important points due to the limited space. You should also design this version using a maximum of one or two links with short, but strong call to actions.
Maybe the customers in your email list are technologically savvy and are frequently viewing your emails through their mobile phones. To get your message across better, make sure your email templates render properly on all phones. Return Path and Litmus are just a couple of the many vendors out there that can help you with just this. Basically, you’ll create an HTML email as usual and either load it into their system or send a live test message to them. You’ll then see screen captures of how your email renders across all ISPs and mobile phones. Based on what you see, adjust your templates accordingly so that they display perfectly in all locations. An email preview tool is especially helpful when it comes to mobile rendering since it can be incredibly difficult to test.
Since you know that your customers are using their phones to interact with you, take the next step and build a mobile website to link your emails to. Again, there are several vendors that can assist with this if resources are not available within your own company. They all offer a number of different solutions from out-of-the-box software to a completely customized store. Linking to a mobile site from a mobile email will streamline the shopping experience and simplify the entire purchase process. Customers will appreciate that they are given a choice in how they want to interact with you. In the end, this should result in a completely optimized mobile email flow and you’ll experience higher revenue from it.
If you’re lucky enough to have customers who have both a mobile phone AND have given you the number to it, SMS or text messaging is the next logical step to take in your email marketing strategy. Though it can be expensive, the extra revenue you generate might be well worth it! If you aren’t already, be sure to ask for the mobile carrier at the time of sign up to avoid the cost of acquiring this information later.
To start, determine your strategy for a campaign that coordinates text messages with emails. You’ll want to test whether the combination of an SMS message and an email, an SMS message only or an email only strategy produces the most response or revenue. To do this, cut your email list into at least four test segments – SMS + Email, SMS Only, Email Only and a control. For the creative part, design an email as usual. For the SMS message, create a text version of that is 160 characters or less and includes a link. There are many different vendors out there, such as bit.ly, that can shorten links for you and provide tracking information at the same time.
Next, send your campaign accordingly making sure that your control group doesn’t receive any marketing messages since they will be the basis for comparison. Analyze your results by calculating lifts in whatever metrics are relevant to your business.
All in all, now is the time to start thinking about and developing your mobile strategy. No matter what level of savvy your customers are, start preparing for the time when mobile phones are more commonly used for email than computers. Until that happens, you might even enjoy some extra revenue by letting customers choose how and when they want to view your emails.
