We have not heard much from the email marketing world lately, especially with all the popularity that social and mobile marketing have gained. Email marketing has been deemed by many as an unsuccessful platform. There are opinions all over the web that say that email marketing is not worth the money, or that the results are nothing extraordinary. Reading these opinions, I wondered where they were all coming from. To my knowledge, email marketing has been doing just fine, especially since the burst of popularity in mobile use. After reading the bi-annual report from Knotice on mobile email opens for the first half of 2012, I found that I was right about email marketing.

The report shows that in the first half of the years, email marketing on mobile devices has done nothing but increase in success. In the second half of 2011, Knotice reports that the mobile email open rate was at around 27%. Now in the first half of this year, the mobile email open rate has shot up to about 36%. For desktop, though, the email open rate is at nearly 64%, meaning that over half of marketing emails sent are being opened and viewed. I am having trouble understanding why there are marketing professionals that think email marketing is going down the drain.

The report focuses mainly on mobile open rates, and in it Knotice writes,

In the first half of 2012, steady growth in mobile email open rates continued. During that time, 36.01% of all emails were opened on a mobile device (phones and/or tablets), which is an increase of 32% from late 2011 numbers of 27.39%. This shows the steady, strong increase in mobile open rates continues, which lends further evidence to the accelerating rate of mobile adoption as previously forecast.

Clearly it has been mobile devices that have helped email marketing keep a strong foothold with marketing professionals. Unlike most other forms of mobile marketing, however, Android has not taken the lead in mobile email opens. In the first half of this year, it was the iPhone that led the way in mobile opens with an open rate of 19.71%. Android, of course, followed the iPhone, but not very closely. Android had an open rate of only 5.88%. All other platforms that were listed had open rates of less than 1%. Therefore, we can conclude that it is the iPhone users that can be credited with the majority of mobile email opens.

Just like everything else in the digital world, email has gone mobile. Of course people still love to use desktop platforms to view emails, but mobile platforms offer a convenience factor that people are starting to notice. The simple fact is that email marketing is still a very effective form of marketing, and good results are not hard to come by. The new mobile world has only enhanced email marketing and open rates, and mobile isn’t going anywhere soon.

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Written by Michael Levanduski

Michael Levanduski is a news reporter at Performance Marketing Insider. He’s been a writer at one level or another for the past 15+ years. He has three kids and lives in Grand Rapids, MI.

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