The devices people use continues to get more diverse.
A recent study found that 47% of emails are now opened on smartphones.
That leaves 34% for desktops and about 19% on tablets.
That data doesn’t even include the new device: The Apple Watch.
In the future it seems that people will continue opening email on a variety of devices likely moving more toward the mobile devices like smartphones and watches and away from desktop devices (although those probably won’t disappear completely in the near-term).
Email On Watches?
It won’t take long for people with an Apple Watch to start opening their emails on the new device.
That will present some challenges for marketers looking to continue to have success with email marketing. It’s a challenge, but an opportunity if you take the right approach.
It turns out that right now your HTML emails designed for desktop opening won’t render on the Apple Watch. Your plain text version will display unless you use a nifty workaround.
And that brings us to the idea that now it’s really a requirement to think about email for each of the channels that your users might be using.
Identifying Your Customer
The first step is to determine who your customer is and what device or devices they’re using.
You should have this information available with your email service provider. You could also get an idea by looking at your website analytics (maybe Google Analytics) to see the breakdown by device of how people are visiting your website.
The devices your customers are using will tell you how you should approach email design and email marketing in the future. That and the trends seem to have people shifting more toward the mobile devices and away from desktop.
The step for many businesses will be to create email designs for all devices: Desktop, Tablet, Smartphone and now the Watch.
The other option would be to cater your email marketing program to one specific device. This would depend on who your target customer is, but it might not be a bad strategy. It can make your email program more efficient and even more successful.
I used to work in the catalog industry and one change that some companies did was to go to entirely using their website for sales and discontinuing the catalog all together. It’s a pivot for the business instead of trying to be everything to every one.
Email Strategy For Smartphones And Watches
Now let’s get into a couple of strategies for the two emerging devices.
If you’re thinking that email isn’t important with smartphones and smartwatches, we can squash that belief. According to new data, email is more commonly used on smartphones than social media, watching video, using maps and other activities.
A new study found that people pick up their smartphone 1,500 times each week. They pick it up at 7:30 AM right when they wake up. It’s often the first thing they do after opening their eyes.
Many check their email sometimes without even thinking. It’s become a reflex.
From that data come two potential strategies for your future email campaigns.
First, morning remains a good time to send your emails. If you send it right before your customer wakes up you can be the first email they see.
But that can also get tricky especially during the week when many brands are sending emails. You could take the approach to send emails in the mornings on the weekends when there is less competition.
Second, it is possible that you can now send more emails than you have in the past. People don’t want spam, but they do want content that interests them and they want it perhaps more than they even think.
If people are looking at their phone 1,500 times per week they’re looking for information. They’re checking email, social media, websites and more for information.
So if you have the resources you can up your frequency and test it over time to see what the right frequency is for your mobile customers.
Or if you decide to switch to using mobile-only email you could use the time you save for creating more mobile emails instead of one email for both desktop and mobile.
It’s still early for assumptions on the Apple Watch, but it seems like people would use it just as much as smartphones and perhaps even more often. A watch is even more attached to your body than a phone after all.
Conclusion
A final point to remember is that you’ll want the design of your email to be optimized for smartphones and smartwatches. There is specific coding involved to ensure that what you want customers to see is what renders on the device.
But the big thing from a marketer’s standpoint is that the screen is getting smaller. You have to determine the most important item content you want customers to see and design your email around that in the most efficient way possible.
The more content you try to include the worse the experience will likely be for the recipient.
Work with a designer that can handle the technical side of the design and create a calendar for your campaigns. Keep the content focus tight and you should be in good shape for your email marketing as we move toward more smartphone and smartwatch use in the future.
