Mobile Email: Trends, Challenges, Solutions and Resources for 2010

Author:

Mark Brownlow

Source:

It’s hard to find a clear explanation of just how the growth of mobile email changes things for email marketers. Partly because there are no simple answers to satisfy our need for…simple answers. For a long time you could hear experts saying you should simply add a link to a mobile-friendly version of your email at the top of your templates.
 
Which sounded easy until you actually tried to create a link that would work on all mobile devices.
 
 
Or tried to define exactly what a mobile-friendly version should look like.
What we do know is that the challenge is shifting. So after setting the scene last week, it’s time to explore the issues in more depth…
 
Previously, the big deal with mobile email was the poor way that most devices could handle HTML email: they made a mess of it. And with little common ground between different mobile devices, it was nigh on impossible to find nice design solutions.
 
Fortunately, the “do nothing about it” approach was not an unreasonable strategy. Why?
 
Mobile email was more or less limited to B2B. More importantly, people largely used mobile email to sort their email, responding to important, personal messages and saving the rest for back at the PC.
 
There simply weren’t enough people trying to read and interact with your emails to panic about the whole mobile email issue.
 
That admirable “head in the sand” approach is now looking a little tired, because the nature of mobile email has changed. For a start, there’s much more of it about than before.
 
For example, in their report of a survey of over 2,000 adults in the US and UK, e-Dialog noted that ...