Research Shows More People Access Email Via Mobile Phones

The number of people using mobile devices to access their email accounts is slowly rising, research shows.

Email has traditionally displayed very badly on mobile phones on account of phones' small screen size and inability to handle HTML. But the way email marketing messages displayed on mobile devices has been of low concern becuase they used to represent only a small proportion of the subscriber base.

Not so anymore: according to a recent ComScore study of mobile phone users in the UK, 13.1% have used their handset to view email. This figure is weighted (unsurprisingly) heavily towards smartphone users:

• 35.4% of smartphone users
• 75.4% of iPhone users

As mobile users become "smarter", so must marketers if they are to broadcast their emails to mobile browsers successfully. The number of people accessing email via their mobiles is only expected to increase with Juniper Research predicting smartphone annual sales reaching over 300 million by 2013. That's almost 25% of the market.

Sending email marketing messages to mobiles requires a different strategy to those used for PCs and laptops; one that takes into special account mobile phone user's browsing habits (for instance, do they simply 'triage' the most important emails, delete irrelevant looking ones and save the rest for home?) and whether or not their model can support HTML, to name just two key variables.

You may or may not see this as a threat to your business but having a marketing strategy for mobile browsers will be very beneficial: it will increase potential reach across your subscriber base and will also reduce the amount of unsubscribe requests received from frustrated subscribers unable to view your emails the way they want to.

So, do you have an 'email marketing to mobile phones' strategy ready for 2010 and beyond? Because it may be you have little say in the matter in a few years' time...

Photo credit: Milica Sekulic