A little over a year ago, we started to notice that more and more people were reading our monthly email newsletter on their mobile devices. With a growing audience of readers on-the-go, we made our email newsletters responsive. And that mobile readership has only grown since then — now nearly 50% of our readers open our emails on a smartphone or tablet.
We took what we learned and released a series of responsive email templates, but they didn't get along with Outlook. Now we're poised to release a new responsive email framework that's Outlook-ready. But why all the fuss with email newsletters that work across devices? Well, the facts are just too hard to ignore. Let's take a look at a few of them:
Marketing platform Knotice conducted a study that revealed: more than 20% of emails sent in the first six months of 2011 were opened on a mobile device. The same study also found that since the fourth quarter of last year, mobile shares of email open rates increased by 51%.
Knotice wasn't the only ones to notice (pun fully intended) the trend. Return Path, another email service, predicted that mobile would leave web and desktop email client usage in the dust by July 2012. But it happened a heckuv a lot sooner and they found that 35.6% of all Campaign Monitor emails were opened on an iOS device.
So mobile is a thing. And it ain't going away. Our audience is mobile and we need to be as well.
Mobile Triage is a Myth
It's a myth that people use their phones or tablets to triage their email. Litmus, which allows you to preview your email campaigns, found that 2 to 3% of emails are opened on two different platforms. They also found that fewer people tap through on mobile, but open rates are high — 55% compared to 43% on desktop.
But there's good news. When it comes to checking their emails, 43% of mobile email users do so four or more times a day. And a stunning 43% of all email opens occur all on mobile devices, quickly overshadowing desktop.
We Need a Framework, Not a Template
Since we launched our templates last year, we've worked hard to develop the content that goes into an email newsletter. We realize that marketers need to worry less about technical gotchas and more on the content. A responsive email framework helps with that more than a template could. Ink, which will be released soon, is a framework, not a series of templates. Think of it as Foundation for emails.
A responsive email framework is imperative. More and more of our audience is mobile, and that's only going to grow with the proliferation of devices. Consider this last thought: emails have led to more conversions than Facebook and Twitter by 7%. That's something we can't pass up. And this is how we have to think about emails now.