Mobile E-Mail Users Not Ideal Target for Marketers

Marketing initiatives through e-mail may be an appealing and potentially rewarding venture, but shifting over to targeting mobile e-mail users may not hold nearly as much bang for the buck. This is because of the current limits to mobile e-mail’s capabilities as well as mobile e-mail users’ habits.

About 92% of mobile e-mail users surveyed by ExactTarget skimmed e-mail messages on their phones and waited to read it in its entirety when they got to their desktop or laptop computers.

Fifty-four percent of respondents indicated that they click on links in e-mails they receive on their mobile devices, while only 20% said they make online purchases.

Of the 292 mobile e-mail users surveyed for the "E-mail Marketing for the Third Screen" report, 80% indicated that they read their mobile e-mail at home, while 73% said they read their mobile e-mail messages while their car was stopped, and 61% said they read their messages during a meeting or a class. Sixty percent indicated that they read their mobile e-mails at work, and 46% said they read their e-mails during dinner.

A cozy 43% said they read their mobile e-mails while in bed, while a dangerous 39% said they read their messages while driving.

Mobile e-mail users were mostly between the ages of 18 and 44, either self-employed or employed full-time, highly educated, and had annual household incomes of at least $100,000.

A measly 9% of mobile users read e-mails on their devices according to Ingenio Inc. and Harris Interactive. However, almost a third of respondents said they planned to do so within the next three years.

Links in mobile e-mails are unappealing mostly because of long page load times on mobile devices, though this should be a shrinking issue with the emergence of 3G networks.

Traditional e-mail is not totally safe from hurdles either. Marketers targeting teens through e-mail initiatives might find it discouraging to find that these young Web users seem to be exhibiting a shift in focus away from e-mail and towards social networks as a primary form of online communication. These teen users mostly view e-mail as a business-related form of communication, according to a CNET article.

Sources:

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1005156

http://news.com.com/Kids+say+e-mail+is%2C+like%2C+soooo+dead/2009-
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