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Get smart about email marketing: the mobile movement

Email marketing is an ever-evolving medium. As the oldest form of Internet marketing, people like to think that email has declined in the face of newer methods of reaching the growing Internet populous. Those people seem to forget that they probably have multiple email accounts and are subscribed to a few e-newsletters. Email communication is actually alive, well and on the rise.

Why is this? A lot of it has to do with the rise of the mobile Internet and the smartphone. The rise of mobile media has caused a shift in email marketing tactics while preventing its overall extinction as an effective marketing medium.

Web-Based Email Declining, Mobile Email Increasing
Today’s companies must continually tweak their marketing programs to embrace changes in technology and the way people interact with media. In 2011, comScore, a digital marketing research organization, released statistics regarding email usage. According to their study, visitors to web-based email programs dropped by six percent, with engagement dropping further.

During the same time period, the number of people accessing email through a mobile device climbed by a staggering 36 percent. Those numbers were even higher among the youngest groups studied. This points to a trend among users of shifting from web-based email to mobile platforms, and marketers need to take notice of this trend and adjust their marketing techniques accordingly.

Why This Matters
Why does this change matter? The savvy marketer or successful business owner is going to tailor marketing messages to the audience. If the audience is switching from computer-based email to mobile-based email, then the formatting of the message must change to maintain accessibility. The phone simply does not display email the same way the computer screen does, and an email that is not displayed well is not going to be read.

Enhance the Viewing Experience
When email marketing was at its height, HTML messaging was ideal because it allowed the marketer to include many images to accompany the marketing message. Yet, this may not be the most effective way to market to smartphone users. Some smartphones only receive text versions of email. Marketers either must invest in programming that can detect this fact and switch to text versions when necessary, or change their emails to be more mobile-friendly for all users.

Even with images or HTML, the mobile device displays email differently than the computer. For instance, a well-designed mobile layout requires a banner height of 125 or fewer pixels and a maximum image size of 480 pixels. It also requires the text to be aligned to the left, which allows the user to read the text without needing to scroll across the screen.

The Right Marketing Help Is Essential
It is changes like these that make working with an email marketing consultant so important. These professionals are knowledgeable about these changes and how they affect marketing strategies. With the right consultant, a business can design a successful email marketing campaign to reach users no matter what platform they are using to access their messages.

Email marketing is not dead, but it has changed. Messages must change as well in order to maintain accessibility to all users. Only by keeping up with those changes can a 2012 email marketing campaign be successful.

This is a guest post by Lindsey Harper Mac who is a professional writer living in the Indianapolis area. She specializes in writing about business and technology. Currently, Lindsey is completing work on her master’s degree. You can follow her on Twitter @HarperMac11.