[Day 2] Email Insiders Summit – Mobile Email De-mystified

Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget and Deirdre Baird, Pivitol Veracity discuss how the mobile growth, challenges and how to optimize mobile email. Notworthy was that 2007 was the first year that smartphone sales overtook laptop and pcs for the first time. Some interesting metrics from Morgan:

Symbian OS (Nokia devices use) is only 1% of market share in US, but roughly 65% worldwide. RIM (Blackberry) comprises 41% in the US, but 11% WW. Apple iphone is 28% US marketshare and 7%WW.

Email – the next killer app of mobile? It’s entirely possible that email could overtake sms/text in the next few years, particularily in the US where each sent/received text message costs money and email is free. Today however, the email in mobile is not a full feature experience and roughly 50% of users find mobile email functionality inferior to computer clients.

Multi vs Single Platform Users – 52% access the same account through mobile and computer; 48% maintain a unique mobile email address (note this survey was taken at the cusp of the iPhone launch).

Deirdre takes over to discuss how we can optimize for mobile email readers. She gives an example of one email viewed in four different devices:

• Symbian, the global leader, shows on the text of an HTML part, and only full URLs are clickable
• Blackberry, the US leader, strips the html of an email and only keeps the text part and will link to image URLs
• Win Mobile 6 has html support, images off by default
• Apple iPhone, html support and images

Three reasons to optimize?

• Customer,  ”not you,” controls which email client to read from
• over 50% receive the same email and both platforms
• email client they use directly drives their experience. These experiences are as varied as there are clients

Other thoughts? Images off is the new norm. The “wiew this email on your mobile device” is not a good solution since mobile browsers have rendering issues across platforms.

Marketer’s use of top real estate: 48% have “add at address book” at top, 60% have “click to view” at top to combat rendering image issue despite the image enable like nearby in the browser/client. Also 2/3rds of recipients with preview panes, rely on them! (Jupiter Research)

Mobile optimization tips– 640 pixel width maximum recommended, and keep the “weight” at 20KB or less (that’s after images are downloaded). Don’t bother with images spacers, blackberry will just mess it up. Use full URLs or it won’t be clickable.