More and more key decision makers are reading their email on smartphones; and more and more of those key decision makers are using iPhones. What does your email look like on their screens?
“…Looks like the iPhone hasn’t lost its mojo after all. Apple announced today that more than 1 million iPhone 3G S had been sold during its debut weekend, well ahead of analyst expectations.
Apple also said that six million customers had downloaded the new iPhone 3.0 operating system boasting more than 100 added features. Few had predicted that the iPhone 3G S would match the million units sold out of the gate by the 3G model a year ago, especially since it was released in only eight compared to 21 countries last year…” read more
Here are some articles that will help to prevent your email from looking like a rotten apple on an iPhone:
- The Mobile Version Link in HTML Email. Hmmm
- Special Report: iPhones and Email Marketing. 10 Pros and Cons (Free Trial Subscription required)
- How to Design Email for Mobile Devices
- Email Design for iPhones
- Mobile Email: The Marketing Challenges
One thing is for certain, you should start including an iPhone, Blackberry and other mobile devices on your list of clients that you test your email campaigns on. Unless of course, you don’t mind sending rotten apples to the key decision makers you communicate with.
According to recent ComScore data, there are over 50 million affluent ($100k +/year) Internet users in the United States, making up over 26% of the entire US Internet demographic.
So how do high-end product and service suppliers reach this wealthy segment of Internet users?
“Many of the luxury brands do e-mail marketing,” said professor Xavier Drèze of the Wharton School of Business. “Especially now, because as the customer base shrinks, you want to re-target them and e-mail is the best way to target.” continue reading
But if you are going to dive into marketing to the top earners by email, ensure that your HTML email designs are tested on mobile platforms, because this demographic is probably checking their email on their mobile devices. You could also consider sending personalized email-to-SMS messages to this segment.
Last year I assisted a friend with some copy for a sponsorship letter. Because I don’t have any formal fund-raising experience, I did a little research before committing anything to the page. I’m glad that I did, because I found some valuable information from Tom Ahern, an expert at fund-raising copy. As Tom sees it, there are basically four different personality types that should be considered when creating your copy; amiables, expressives, skeptics and bottom-liners. Joanne Fritz at about.com provides a nice overview about the distinctions between these personality types and highlights some tips from Tom’s book about how to respond effectively to each one.
Of course, the same is true with any online communication and we should keep human personalities in mind when composing copy for our websites, blogs and email campaigns. Although human personalities don’t necessarily change online (although a skeptic might be even more skeptical on the Internet,) there are some things to consider when transferring Tom’s copywriting advice to an Internet audience.
So while content length, format and style might require some readjustments for an online audience, we are still communicating with different personalities all the time. Understanding that can certainly help us to be more successful in achieving the results that we desire.
In email delivery, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to HTML formatting. So unless text-only messages are used, email marketers must either prepare multiple versions or spend time testing campaigns across different email clients and platforms. That’s life Joey – until the email standards lobby gathers enough steam to persuade email and mobile platform developers to subscribe to some HTML email rendering standards.
Mark Brownlow published an informative post with links to articles and discussions about image blocking, mobile email growth, iPhone email design considerations and even a post that includes an actual email template that Glen Lipka designed which seems to test well across most clients. Glen is a NY Jets fan. As a Giants supporter, I won’t hold that against him.
My tests with our own GroupMail email templates have proved successful with rendering across most email clients and even seem to circumvent image suppression in Outlook Express. I haven’t done any formal testing though. If anyone has performed formal testing with GroupMail templates and has records or screenshots of the results, I’d love to hear from you!
