Email Marketing in the Mobile Age

112 billions business emails are being sent everyday, 93 billion private mails. Even though it is not perceived as a very "hip" channel, after more then a decade of successful usage, email marketing still is tremendously relevant. 

With the mobile internet on the rise, sending and receiving mails brings new challenges but also opportunities. The obvious advantage is the fact that with our mobile devices we are always online and many check their mails even more frequently then on a PC. 
On the other hand, conversion rates of mails being opened on mobile devices are much worse. This is mainly because most people do not make purchasing decisions while they are on the go. Furthermore, many people have a higher feeling of trust when they are online on a home PC. Also, it is still hard to track people's interactions and purchasing behavior across multiple devices. 

If you research for the best practices of email marketing, most tips have been around for quite some time:

1. Relevant content: Here it will be exciting to see, if automized content can be increasingly contextualized to address people individually in their (mobile) environment

2. Intelligent Personalization (see 1.)

3. Holistic and integral communication across all channels

4. Modern email marketing tool-architecture that allows a data-driven and comprehensive CRM.

5. Staying creative in the way you approach customers or leads (despite automatization and data-drivenness) 

6. One last important point is the format of the mobile screen. Thorsten Blöcker, head of consulting at the marketing agency Netnomics, says in a blog post: marketeers should try to make their mobile mails as interactive and compact as an app. 

This video shows an example how mobile mails can be optimized for the channel and how content can be adapted to a small screen.

It will be exciting how email as a channel will evolve in the mobile age. If email marketeers make their content adaptive to the mobile screen and if data-driven personalization is used more and more for a creative address, its relevance could further increase.