Sep 10, 2012 at 5:38pm ET by Greg Sterling
Reading email is one of the primary activities of smartphone owners. Indeed, several reports over the past year have indicated that more and more email interaction is happening on mobile devices. Adding to that narrative Knotice today released its latest Email Opens report covering the first half of 2012.Since 2010 the company has documented the rise of mobile email, which obviously corresponds to increasing smartphone penetration in the US.
Source: Knotice (9/12)
The report benchmarks everything to PC open rates and related email marketing data. The PC still dominates most email interaction and sees 64 percent of opens overall. However, mobile (tablet + smartphones) sees the other 36 percent. That’s up from 27 percent at the end of last year.
If the current pace of mobile email growth continues nearly 45 percent of “on the go” consumers will be reading email on their smartphones or tablets by this time next year. Indeed, Knotice recommends that email marketers “begin planning for a point in time when mobile users will be the majority audience.”
Email Open Rates:
Source: Knotice (9/12)
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear or explained iOS devices dominate Android when it comes to open rates.
Source: Knotice (9/12)
Knotice says that iOS and Android, in the US, “account for 99.19 percent of all mobile email opens.” Financial services and consumer services (whatever that means precisely) were the two categories that saw the highest percentage of mobile opens.
Source: Knotice (9/12)
Knotice added that “the distribution of [email] opens occurring on phones is more heavily concentrated within the first 3 hours following email delivery . . . Knotice data [also] reveal email engagement by phone is significantly higher in the first 90 minutes, with negligible differences between phone, tablet and desktop email engagement after approximately 5 hours.”
Accordingly the Knotice report had some basic “best practices” recommendations:
- Embrace a “mobile first” mindset
- Recognize that now, by default, email marketers are effectively mobile marketers
- Know your mobile audience (via data and analytics)
The implications of all this are fairly straightforward: take mobile seriously and be ready to optimize email campaigns for an increasingly large mobile user base. For marketers that are complacent or skeptical of mobile, there’s a chance that email campaigns not optimized for mobile will simply no longer be seen.
