Still haven’t taken the plunge into mobile-friendly email? Here’s a compelling case that’s sure to light a fire under your… uh, email marketing strategy.

While overall email marketing trends show about 42 percent of all email opens are on mobile devices, here at CUnet, our clients are skewing even higher. It’s not uncommon for us to see a single message’s mobile renders exceed 60 percent these days, though they more often fall into the 45 – 55 percent range.

As we’ve observed this ongoing climb in mobile opens, we saw the performance of some messages that don’t render so well on smartphones really take a hit. One CUnet client saw open rates on their autoresponder campaign drop 30 percent over eight months. During this same period, click rates dipped more than 40 percent. Ouch!

We had a sneaking suspicion that increased adoption of smartphones to access email was at the heart of this painful, downward trend. We’d been eager to transition this client to a fresh template, and once they had a close look at their plummeting analytics, they were on board.

The solution was a simple, streamlined, single-column template with responsive and scalable elements that would function just as well on a computer screen as on a smartphone or tablet. Our client wasn’t ready to rethink their strategy, so no changes to copy, calls to action or subject line were applied—making for a near-perfect perfect apples-to-apple comparison.*

The results were pretty phenomenal! Over the first three months the new template was live, we saw an impressive 158 percent increase in click volume that far outpaced their 57 percent lift in overall email send volume. That amounted to an astronomical 65 percent leap in overall click-through rates! Why? We’re pretty certain it had a little something to do with their 160 percent lift in mobile render volume during that same period.

This client has also seen impressive gains in overall open rates on all rendering platforms—which have more than doubled since their lowest point. Since there were no changes to the subject line or preheader, we believe the new design also prompted more recipients to download the email’s images, which is how opens are calculated.

Still not convinced it’s time to rethink your email marketing for the mobile audience? Consider these facts:

• Email is the number one activity on mobile devices.
• Wireless email use is expected to increase 240 percent between 2011 and 2015.
• 63 percent of Americans will close or delete a message not optimized for mobile.
• CUnet is blazing the trail for cross-platform email marketing in the education lead gen market, with savvy strategies that bridge the gap between email, mobile and call centers (feel free to ask us about it at sales@cunet.com or contact your account rep!).

Not sure where to get started with cross-platform email design? We’ll explain the basics and share some of our favorite tips in next week’s blog post.

* In the spirit of full disclosure, we should add that CUnet migrated to a new email service provider in the middle of the period in which we tracked the performance of the new template. And while that may have been a contributor to these performance lifts, we have definitely seen temporary performance declines for other clients while their sender reputation was rebuilt with a new IP address.

About Jen Capstraw

As CUnet’s Email Marketing Strategist, Jen Capstraw lives and breathes opens, clicks, and A/B testing. Her 15-plus-year career includes digital and traditional marketing, corporate communications, media relations and a stint as a TV hostess for the Virginia Lottery. You can follow her email marketing boards on Pinterest (pinterest.com/jencapstraw) or on Twitter (http://twitter.com/jencapstraw).

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Tags: analytics, benchmarking, email marketing, mobile email marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 7th, 2013 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.