The e-mail marketing industry has grown up and developed as the PC market has and is still primarily designed for the desktop / laptop delivery of messages. Bigger screens, more bandwidth and web based mail delivery have made it very convenient, and effective, for e-mail marketers.
The market, however, is shifting. The traditional market isn’t going away (it never really does) but it is certainly changing. comScore underscores that fact with some current findings about the shift to mobile e-mail usage. It is important to please note that the web based e-mail referred to here does not include Outlook and other e-mail applications.
While this decline is obvious the increase in mobile e-mail usage is climbing quite dramatically. First at look overall usage.
Now by demographic.
None of this data signals any death knell for email marketing. It’s quite the contrary. E-mail will be around for a long time in the business world and whether someone uses it in their personal life or not will not negate that need regardless of what the younger crowd says or thinks.
Marketers do have to pay very close attention, however, to who uses e-mail, in what environment and when in order to remain effective. With that in mind the shift to mobile is going to be the point where marketers experience a make or break moment of sorts.
Just like any Internet marketing option there are always the early adopters who jump ahead of the curve and get in the game early. The next wave is the largest and most important because these are the people who get the concept but waited for the bleeding edge experiments to be completed before they commit fully. With email and the mobile world that group is getting on board. The rest will be the trailers (or laggards) while there will be a group that just doesn’t change. We have seen the same evolutionary cycle with search etc.
So as an Internet marketer are you making the switch to make sure your email marketing efforts don’t miss the mobile crowd? Have you taken a good hard look at your users and decided whether their mobile usage dictates your switch from what you might be comfortable with to a new way of looking at reaching them?
These are important questions facing marketers every day but the pressure of budgets and doing what might be considered cool (social media) over what might be more effective and truly measurable can cause conflict.
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