Mat Diss, co-founder and director of mobile web company bemoko, explains why email marketers face a huge challenge when it comes to credibility.
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Who doesn’t waste a few minutes daily just checking nothing important has been redirected by the spam filter, and clearing out the rest? Ask anyone with an inbox and they’ll bemoan the flood of unsolicited ‘spam’.
So, it’s encouraging to read that Forrester Research estimates consumers will receive more than 9,000 email marketing messages a year by 2014!
Marketers face a huge challenge to be seen as a legitimate source of useful brand awareness, and not, as one marketing system would have it, a provider of ‘aggressive email’.
This is an issue that is greatly exacerbated when you consider how much mail is accessed by people from a mobile. Smartphone penetration continues to grow, and this week Apple has announced that it has sold more than 1.7 million iPhone 4 handsets in three days. What strikes any user of these latest generation mobiles is just how easy it is to integrate multiple inboxes onto your handset. So much so that a quarter of people today will view email marketing messages on their mobile.
Great I hear you say; we can get our brand message right into the customer’s pocket, into their most personal space, and on a device that allows them to immediately interact with the brand, wherever they are. The problem is that, even when email is solicited by the customer, they are almost always impossible to read on a mobile. Even when you click on the ‘Can’t read this?’ link you still get a page formatted for a PC screen! This is a huge missed opportunity and a terrible example of brand building.
As an industry we have to get this right, at both the content and delivery level. From a content perspective it needs to be personal to the user for them to welcome it on their device. It needs to be timely and relevant, so marketers need to incorporate behavioural marketing and crucially use in a respectful and responsible manner.
From a delivery perspective emails must integrate with existing content to create a truly inclusive mobile experience. To do this, mobile marketing emails need to be prepared and delivered in a format that means they can be read on any mobile device. Text only, slow, poorly rendered and annoying marketing emails just won’t cut it anymore with a savvy audience, they are invariably going to end up in the trash folder, unread.
Our industry needs to wake up to creating interactive mobile campaigns incorporating email and a mobile Internet site to deliver the best user experience to every phone. Do it right and I predict you could extend a campaign’s reach by 25% from the outset. There’s a number to consider…
