Did you know 36.1% of Americans older than 13 have smart phones? And of those 36.1% of Smartphone users, 66% of them check their e-mail on their mobile device at least once a day. 55% of those people will take action from an e-mail on their phone. The amount of e-mail, ads and marketing campaigns that appear on the screens of mobile devices day to day is huge, yet not many businesses are taking advantage of this new channel.

Before you start a mobile-friendly e-mail marketing campaign it’s important to look at your audience. Many e-mail campaign software programs let you monitor your traffic and click-through rates to understand how many people are looking at your e-mail on their phones. After you try your first campaign, check the numbers again to see if it’s a viable marketing strategy.If you use your phone to check e-mail like I do, you probably don’t even spend time looking at sites formatted for computer screens. Once you’re done zooming in and out you’ve forgotten what you were looking for. So how do you lay out an e-mail campaign for your mobile customers?

• Think small – pull your phone out and look at the screen. This is your template. Your text, pictures and lead generating forms need to fit in this space comfortably. Most mobile screens can comfortably fit an e-mail or mobile site that’s ¼ the size of that viewed on a desktop.
• Remember the point – You’re trying to generate leads. Don’t use up all your space with copy. Be short and concise. Make your copy jump out at readers so you can get the most influence from only a paragraph of text. Then use the rest of the space for lead generating forms.
• This isn’t broadband – Your e-mail needs to load quickly. Don’t bog it down with large pictures or fancy formatting. How many times have you skipped over a page that wasn’t loading fast enough? If you’ve done it, your customers have done it too. I would suggest sending an e-mail that’s 20k or smaller. This ensures it won’t take forever to download.

If you’ve mobile campaign is successful, build a mobile e-mail list that only gets the small version of the regular e-mail. This will help you cater to a specific group of people and therefore increase your leads.

Here’s a great case study from MarketingSherpa that shows how a targeted mobile e-mail campaign was successful.

Have you gone mobile? Tell us about it in the comment section below.