Increase Engagement with Mobile Email Marketing

Here’s a question…

How often do you check your email on a mobile device?

Weekly? Daily? Hourly?

Chances are it’s closer to the latter rather than the former. Most people are within an arm’s reach of their phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The good news?

You’re not alone.

Depending on the study, email opened on mobile devices now accounts for 45% (according to Adestra) to 53% (according to Experian) of all opens. It shouldn’t be surprising that number has grown 180% between 2011 and 2014, and will continue to rise.

Mobile is here to stay, that’s a fact.

Yet, brands and marketers are still approaching email as if they were only being opened on desktop devices.

As you can see in the image above from Econsultancy, well over half of all respondents in the “Email Marketing Industry Census” have either a basic or non-existent strategy for optimizing email marketing on mobile devices.

Doing this can lead to a dramatic decrease in both clicks and opens. Leading into an overall decrease in engagement, something that will generally have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Engagement Matters

It seems that mobile marketing has had a bit of a leg up on its counterparts when it comes to engagement.

Engagement, especially sustained engagement, matters. In fact, sustained engagement is now considered to be an incredibly important benchmark of success when it comes to email marketing campaigns.

From Campaign Monitor’s “Email Trends Report: Mobile vs. Desktop:”

The new standard in successful email marketing is not only capturing a subscriber’s attention – but holding it long enough to get them to return and engage with your content.

At Zembula, we’ve seen incredible results from our clients who have used interactive email marketing campaigns to increase engagement.

Reveal based marketing campaigns that feature games, motion interaction and problem solving keep that sustained engagement going for an average of 24 seconds, much longer than traditional email marketing campaigns.

As illustrated in this survey by BlueHornet, readers who receive emails that are not optimized for mobile will either delete it, or worse, unsubscribe from the email campaign.

The evidence is pretty clear, if 71% of your subscribers are deleting your emails they can’t engage. And that’s a problem.

Marketers and brands need to be looking at ways to not only optimize mobile campaigns, but also improve engagement within those campaigns.

Mobile Marketing Best Practices

So how can marketers and brands improve engagement on mobile?

There are a few best practices that can be put in place to help improve email marketing campaigns.

Responsive Design

One of the biggest keys to success on mobile is having a responsive design. As we’ve seen above, without it, most people will immediately delete the email. Invest in (or create) some templates that will be mobile optimized.

Mobile Specific Campaigns

Marketers and brands that are looking to increase opens and engagement can launch mobile specific campaigns. A perfect example of this is a reveal marketing campaign targeted towards mobile users in order to dramatically increase sustained engagement over general email marketing campaigns.

From Line

In most mobile email apps it will be the from line that is highlighted over the actual subject line. So, brands and marketers should use a from line that immediately grabs the attention of the reader, and comes from a person not just a brand.

Keep it Simple

Remember, an email that pops from a desktop can look incredibly squashed on a small screen. When you do design for mobile email campaigns, be sure to remove unnecessary links and banners that can distract from getting those important clicks.

Links Near the Top

Mobile email users typically don’t devote nearly as much time to scrolling through emails as their desktop counterparts. Instead they tend to skim. You can be sure to grab the attention of your readers right from the start if you include your call to action near the top of the email.

Employing some of the these best practices in your next mobile campaign can go a long way towards increasing the open rate, sustained engagement and click through rates of your emails