Marketers should design emails for mobiles: survey

While there is a recent trend for subscribers to view emails on their phones, marketers are still designing image laden-messages for desktop users which often render poorly on mobile devices. 

According to stats quoted in the MailerMailer Email Marketing Metrics Report (pdf), 64% of key decision makers are using mobiles to view emails, yet less than 50% of marketers are making sure that their messages are accessible to these users.

Though some phones can display images on emails, there are enough users with phones that do not that marketers need to cater for them. The report provides three recommendations:

• Give users the option of a mobile edition when they sign up for emails.
• Create a separate edition of the email without images and with easy to read text.
• Provide a link to the standard version of the email.

Other highlights from the Email Metrics study, which analysed more than 300m emails from 3,000+ email senders:

• 74.5% of emails are opened within the first 24 hours,  and 84.3% within the first 48 hours.
• Emails sent on Mondays have both the highest open and click rates, while weekends and the beginning of the week outperform the other days.
• Overall unique open rates stand at 12.52%, down slightly from the 13.20% open rate of the first half of 2008.
• Subject lines of 35 characters or less achieved the highest open and click rates.