If optimizing your email marketing for mobile hasn’t been a priority, now is the time to make it one. Nearly three quarters of consumers surveyed (73%) use their mobile phone to access one or more email accounts and 31% say their mobile phone is their primary email device, according to research by The Relevancy Group and Liveclicker. Further, 42% of those consumers say they use their smartphone to triage their email. And many of those respondents are none too pleased with their email experience. In fact, 32% say email marketing messages are too small to read or interact with on their mobile device, and 26% say that the websites they click through to aren’t optimized for mobile.
Consumers polled have other gripes about mobile email. Messages frequency is an irritant to 44% of respondents, who say they get too many messages. Relevancy—or, rather, irrelevancy, is another problem: 37% of consumers surveyed say that the marketing messages they receive aren’t relevant to them.
Meeting customers’ expectations and preferences can be a challenge for marketers, according to those polled for the Relevancy Group and Liveclicker study. Managing the frequency of offers is tough for 23% of enterprise and 19% of midmarket marketers polled. Managing offers across multiple campaigns is a big issue for 29% of enterprise respondents and 26% of midmarket respondents; coordinating marketing across department and brands is a top challenge for 28% of enterprise and 21% of midmarket respondents. In terms of relevancy, one major challenge is the lack of adequate IT support for data extraction, says 23% of enterprise and 28% of midmarket respondents.
But those challenges aren’t holding back all marketers from optimizing their email. According to the report, 37% of enterprise and 29% of midmarket marketers surveyed change the offer content at the time of open based on a recipient’s location; 31% of enterprise and 26% of midmarket respondents change their offer content based on devise type; and 25% of enterprise and 34% of midmarket respondents change offers based on inventory levels. Other elements that respondents use include expiring images based on time (24% enterprise, 18% midmarket), changing offer content based on the weather (18% enterprise, 16% midmarket), and including countdown timers with email offers (28% enterprise, 19% midmarket).
Not surprisingly, marketers polled aim to improve their email ROI in 2015. The top priorities for doing so are greater use of analytics (46% enterprise, 39% midmarket respondents); improving segmentation and targeting (40% enterprise, 36% midmarket); centralizing their customer data and making it actionable (33% enterprise, 29% midmarket); using real-time data (32% enterprise, 27% midmarket); and increasing relevancy using dynamic content (31% enterprise, 29% midmarket).
A snapshot of enterprise marketers’ priorities:
And a snapshot of midmarket marketers’ priorities:
Charts created using Piktochart.
