Marketing Research Chart: Customers interacting with mobile email messages

by Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS

With MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas taking place next month, we wanted to look at mobile email message research in this MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week …

Q: What percentage of customers/prospects interact with your organization’s mobile EMAIL messages?

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart

The numbers on the x-axis represent ranges of customer/prospect interaction (e.g., "1-10% of customers click through on an email offer"). The bars represent the amount of marketers who indicated these interaction ranges for clickthrough (dark blue) and open (light blue). For example, 35% of marketers indicate that 1-10% of their customers click through on a mobile email offer.

POINTS TO CONSIDER

A common sight at a marketing industry event is for the speaker (perhaps a speaker from a mobile vendor) to ask the audience to raise their hands if they use a smartphone. Invariably, north of 90% of the audience raises their hands, confirming the speaker’s point that simply everybody is on a smartphone these days.

However, experienced marketers know never to assume that they are the same as their target audience. So in the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we wanted to get a handle on just how prevalent customer interactions were with mobile email.

As you can see, only a very small percent of marketers (2%) find mass adoption of mobile email interaction among their customers.

Why do you think marketers are finding such low interaction with mobile email messages despite the fact that more than half (55.5% according to a July 2012 Nielsen study) of Americans own a smartphone, and about a third of people worldwide (27% according to a first half of 2011 study by Vision Mobile) own a smartphone? Do many of your customers read email on a mix of both mobile devices and personal computers? If so, how do you account for the mixed platform nature of checking email?

How often do your customers interact with mobile emails? Have you prioritized sending mobile-optimized emails to your audience? If so, what factors influenced your decision to do so (or avoid doing so)? Did you take into account analytics information? Demographics? Industry trends? Customer feedback?

One of the largest responses to this question was “don’t know.” How well do you know mobile email engagement metrics for your company? How important or unimportant do you think these numbers will be in 2013?

Share your answers to the above questions, and any additional analysis and tips you may have, in the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn Group for a chance to be published in a future blog post. For more information about mobile marketing, download the free excerpt from the 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report.

Useful links related to this research

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 – February 19-22, 2013 in Las Vegas

Young Adults and Teens Lead Growth Among Smartphone Owners (via nielsenwire)

Global Smartphone Adoption Approaches 30 Percent (via Wired)