Smartphone is a weak word for the gadget that has become the ubiquitous hub of modern line. Life management device might be preferable. Pew reports that 64% of American adults own a smartphone, and that they use it for every imaginable activity — banking, ordering food, watching movies, reading books, managing all manner of transportation from navigation to ordering taxis.
As consumers’ attention lives with their mobile device, so must marketing strategies. Marketers have all sorts of channels available to reach consumers through smartphones: apps, mobile-first web designs, SMS campaigns, mobile ad campaigns, and others. Unfortunately, most marketing and advertising on mobile devices has proven to be expensive with low yield. But there’s an unexpected exception: Email is proving remarkably resilient in the smartphone era.
A strange thing has happened over the last few years even as messaging platforms have proliferated on mobile phones: email has endured. Among all the potential uses of smartphones, reading and writing email is the third most popular activity after text messaging and web surfing — it even tops listening to music. Exact statistics on mobile email reading behavior vary based on audience and type of email, but multiple studies confirm that more than half of email opens are on mobile devices.
When I work with organizations on their marketing and outreach efforts, I try to convince them they can experiment with newfangled means of connecting with customers, but email should be the workhorse of their mobile strategy. The immediate question they want answered is, “Shouldn’t we have an app?” Mobile apps have a high initial and ongoing technical cost, but the real challenge isn’t even a technical one: How do you get people to discover and download your app? Both Apple and Google have north of 1.5 million apps in their respective stores, with a limited number of native app discovery vehicles. You’re left pouring marketing dollars into finding people who will download your app—and then actually use it. The average app loses 77% of users within the first three days of launch. As wearables proliferate, pop-up notifications are an increasingly useful vehicle for app retention and repeat use, but they also risk annoying all but your most devoted customers. Mobile apps have their place with the right use case, but it’s not where most companies should start.
The next question I get is: “Well, how about a mobile-first web design?” Given web traffic trends, mobile-first is a necessity for any successful online marketing operation — but it introduces its own challenges as the screen sizes and display options for mobile devices proliferate. Moreover, mobile-first design requires progressive enhancement, and many organizations aren’t staffed or prepared for ongoing, rolling mobile-first design updates to web applications. Mobile-first also creates user experience challenges for any sophisticated online interaction — pretty much anything that involves filling out a form, like e-commerce.
Which brings us back to email, a tool that has remained dominant for 20 years even as all sorts of competing technologies have sprung up around it. Why does email remain so valuable even in a mobile world? The great challenge of our current media landscape is capturing and retaining user attention. There are so many devices, so many media outlets, so many channels and opportunities that attention is fragmented and difficult to measure. How many people saw that tweet? Are the same people always sharing the same posts? Email’s most redeeming feature is the ability to measure repeat, sustained user attention. An email is, by definition, a unique identifier. You can track multiple opens over time, and build behavioral models to maximize your share of a reader’s attention — companies like Sailthru and ExactTarget are designed specifically to optimize email marketing programs around individual user behavior.
A great example of a sophisticated email marketing program is Trunk Club’s approach. It combines multiple examples of best practices — using automated behavioral analytics to deliver personalized emails that feel intimate; responsive design to maximize mobile response with clear, large calls-to-action; and images optimized for mobile use and a gorgeous shopping experience. Trunk Club also has a mobile app, and when appropriate the email call-to-action will reference the mobile app in a seamless, useful way. Email is clearly part of their strategy to drive repeat traffic back to their mobile app and to their website depending on the campaign.
Companies that implement successful email marketing programs see the impact across multiple channels. The sustained attention from email translates into more time on site and increased lift in other venues. Email marketing has not changed significantly in decades, It’s not sexy. But building a compelling email program is the lowest cost, highest yield way to architect a successful mobile-marketing strategy.
Credit: Nicco Mele for Harvard Business Review
