Email marketing continues to be at the top of the list when it comes to customer communications. According to Forrester, spending will increase to $3.1 billion over the next 5 years, up from 2.1 billion over the course of the next 4 years. But times are a changing. People interact with email very differently than they have before with mobile continuing to be the way people keep in touch.
Mobile
Litmus reports that through April of 2014, 47% of email is being opened on mobile vs. desktop (28%) and webmail (25%). The Radicati Group reports that by 2018, 80% of email users are expected to access their email accounts via a mobile device. Those numbers are staggering and you need to be aware of how this affects your email marketing.
What to do to make sure you get the highest open rate? Make sure you design your emails to be mobile-friendly and render properly on all devices. According to The Science of Email Clicks from Litmus and Mailchimp you could get a 15% increase in your clicks from mobile users. Folks like VerticalResponse, Mailchimp and Constant Contact all have responsive templates.
Webmail
By the end of 2013 Gmail opens accounted for 6% of all opens and likely grew in 2014. But watch out, there are a ton of emails going into the “Promotions” tab with Gmail. There has been a 7.75% decrease in opens since it intro’d Tabs, you know the “feature” where Google decides what’s important to you and what is less important? We almost lost the opportunity to be in a news article because a reporter emailed us through LinkedIn and it went into the Social Tab. Boooo.
What to do? When someone signs up for your list and you see they have a Gmail address, show them a page with a message like this:
“If you’d like to receive our emails into your Primary Gmail Inbox, simply drag our email from the “Promotions” tab to the “Primary” tab and click “Yes” when they ask you if you want to do this for future messages.”
Click Through Rates
Hubspot’s 2014 Science of Email Report shows a negative CTR as more images are included in an email. But do they know what they want? When they were surveyed two-thirds said they wanted image-based emails instead of text-only but in actuality looks like the more images the less the CTR.
What to do? Test your email marketing campaigns head-to-head with images in one and without images in another. You might find that a simpler email gets more clicks. You also might want to think about those folks reading your email on a mobile device. With too many links and too many images you might find that your recipient clicks on the wrong link just because they use their fatter thumb rather than the skinny pinky and get frustrated when they wind up on the wrong page.
For more amazing email marketing stats visit Jordie over at eMailMonday.
