The advent of smartphones and tablets has profoundly changed consumer habits, entertainment and access to information. The user wants fast, immediate and customised design. They’re more and more demanding in terms of experience in all areas. Also for a simple email, they want a flawless experience. The email that seemed simple to design a few years ago has been enriched and reinvented like all the other marketing tools, to adapt to different formats and new consumer habits.
In France, the time spent on smartphones and tablets has gone up 56% between 2012 and 2013, and 16% of internet traffic today comes from smartphones. Mobile usage has changed the face of consumerism. You just have to observe the explosion of push notifications that bloom on our telephones alerting us of any novelty or promotion. For emails, in 2013 72% of French mobile users checked daily their mail on smartphones, compared to 50% in 2011 (Source: SNCD). In passing we note that among smartphone owners, 35% also possess a tablet and of these, 42% have replaced the computer with a tablet.
Email marketing is king
For a brand, email remains the preferred means of communication, whether for prospecting or customer loyalty. On a global level, we can estimate that users receive slightly more than 400 commercial emails each month (Source: Return Path). In France, email is the preferred channel for receiving communications (46%), before websites (32%), snail-mail (10%), social networks (5%), mobile apps (2%), SMS (2%) and telephone (2%).
The challenges are such that it is now essential to analyse and take care of email campaigns. In recent years many tools have been available for performance testing and deliverability of an email, but how can you ensure that the content will be displayed optimally regardless of the device used?
Responsive email, the solution
Today, 13% of internet users encounter problems viewing their emails on a smartphone. If an email can’t adapt to their device for easy reading, 70% of smartphone users delete them and 16% directly unsubscribe (Source: Acxiom 2013).
Responsive emails are the prefect response to the problem of multiple screens: content is displayed in an optimized way for smartphones, tablets, computers and TVs. However, a Responsive email that displays properly on a Samsung may experience a bug on a smartphone of another brand.
Email rendering essentially depends on the terminal and the application used for viewing: the size of the screen, the resolution, the OS version, the browser, … It is therefore necessary to set up the organization and tools adapted to multiple devices, to detect anomalies and correct them as quickly as possible before sending the emails.
Advice 1: accurately target devices
Define a test sample representative of the target market and in accordance with the procedures in mobility
- Analyze resolution combinations / screen sizes / OS
- Take into account the specificities of each OS and each version (Safari by default on iOS vs. native browser on part of the park Android or Google Chrome)
- Test their email on the different types of messaging: native email *, alternative emails** and webmail***
- Identify the impact of each OS update (including browsers e.g. with the SSL flaw iOS 7 corrected by iOS 7.1)
*Native email: email application installed by default on the device, not specific to an email provider.
**Alternative email: apps available in the store, specific to an email provider, installed by the user (e.g. Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo Mail)
***Webmail: mobile messaging consultation portals (type Orange Mail, Hotmail / Outlook, etc.)
Advice 2: Stay tuned to the market
- Do not under-estimate the impact of screen orientation (portrait/landscape, resolution)
- Accurately analyze market trends: resolution rise (full HD, retina display, etc.), market fragmentation for smartphones and tablets.
- Identify new technologies and their consequences, notably in rendering responsive emails (media queries, CSS, etc.)
- Build its strategy in a process of mobility (image size, background color use, etc.) for data usage problems, load times, etc.