Of all of the retail emails sent, nearly half are being opened on smartphones and tablets.
According to the results of research conducted by a mobile marketing firm, Knotice, almost half of all retail advertising and promotional emails that were sent during the last two quarters of 2013 were opened using smartphones and tablets.
This represented a considerable increase over the percentage of emails opened on mobile devices before that.
During the first two quarters of 2013, these emails were being opened 43.2 percent of the time over mobile devices. This represents a 13.9 percent increase in the number of emails that are being seen as mobile marketing instead of over laptops and desktop computers. This insight helps to show advertisers how important it is to ensure that their messages and any links that are provided will be compatible with these smaller screen gadgets.
As 49.2 percent of these communications are now mobile marketing emails, it is clear that a tipping point is reached.
Mobility has now reached an important tipping point as this figure is near enough to half to say that one in every two emails will be opened using a smartphone or tablet. The study that was conducted by Knotice took millions of different retail emails into account during those two half year periods in order to come up with the data that it has recently published. Knotice is a mobile marketing unit of IgnitionOne Inc.
At the moment, the devices that are used to pen the largest number of retail emails are Apple’s iPhone and iPad. That said, it is important to note that Knotice measured the opening of an email as the successful rendering of the images in the message. As the “on” for image rendering in emails is the default setting with which all Apple products are shipped, and as “off” is the default setting for many Android devices, this could cause the natural bias to be skewed toward Apple’s devices.
Equally, though, a growing body of evidence is also showing that Apple devices lead the way when it comes to acting on mobile marketing by registering, participating, and purchasing, so it could be that these are the most relevant devices, at the moment, when it comes to m-commerce.
Smartphone penetration in China has surpassed 66%, with more than 3 million mobile point-of-sale systems set up throughout the country. The vast majority of these systems are equipped with NFC technology and can only be used by devices that are NFC-capable. Currently, these devices are still relatively rare in the global market. While some device makers have plans to launch NFC-enabled smartphones in the coming years, others are looking to bring NFC capabilities to current devices without having to force consumers to wait for or purchase new devices in the future.