Checking email is the top mobile activity among both smartphone and tablet users

Consumers are focusing an ever-increasing amount of daily actions around mobile, and checking email is often cited as one of the most popular activities conducted on such devices.
December 2013 data from Return Path highlighted this trend, showing that more than half of email opens worldwide took place on mobile devices this past holiday season. The other two devices studied, desktop and webmail, came in at just around one-quarter of email opens each.
Christmas Day saw one of the lowest email open rates, likely due to the fact that businesses sent fewer emails on that day, Return Path noted. Though time spent with email was low overall on December 25, the share of opens on mobile devices spiked to 62% that day—mobile’s largest portion throughout the month. Was email one of the mobile activities cutting into holiday “family time”?
Results from July 2013 polling by Deloitte highlighted email’s popularity on mobile devices. Among tablet users polled, checking work or personal email was the No. 1 content activity performed on such a device, cited by half of respondents. And this was even more common on smartphones: Nearly three-quarters of smartphone users said they checked work or personal email on their phone, placing it in the top spot once again.
And mobile email is delivering great returns for US marketers. Q3 2013 analysis by Yesmail showed that revenues per click on mobile marketing emails far exceeded those on desktop, at $7.14 vs. $3.26.