I will link and comment on an external marketing blog, “Fashion retailers are still failing to optimize email marketing for mobile”, by David Moth on 12 November 2013.
In this blog, David talks about a phenomenon that mobile email is an increasingly important marketing channel as stats show that around 40% of email is opened on smartphones. Nowadays, more and more people transform from paper reader to e-version reader. As a result, companies start to sending email rather than paper flyers to the customers. By sending weekly or monthly email, fashion companies are able to effectively communicate with their customers regarding any new arrivals and promotions. However, as the rapid development of smartphone industry, more people intend to read email with their smartphones rather than computers. This turns out to be a problem which is the email compatibility with smartphones. Normal email intended to be read on a computer cannot be loaded properly on a smartphone. For example, people can only see a part of the original image on a smartphone due to the scaling issue. David did a test to receive email from several companies. And,only four brands had any success in rendering emails properly on his Android phone.
“It appears that businesses are finally beginning to react to this change in consumer behavior, as the new Econsultancy/BuyDesire Mobile Marketing and Commerce Report shows that optimized emails are one of the top mobile priorities for businesses in the next 12 months.” In order to allow customers to understand and realize the value of a company’s product or service, the first thing a company needs be aware of is to think the way a customer thinks. From a customer’s perspective, the user friendly emails can definitely catch more attention than a messy and unscaled email. This is same as customer service, the ultimate goal is not just deliver the service, but let the customer enjoy the service. If a company sends email that compatible with both smartphones and computers, the customer will most likely to spend some time to go through the information. Otherwise, the emails that are not compatible with smartphones will be most likely to go to junk folder. Once again, customers have the abilities to see the effort and attitude of a company towards them. Always think the way that customers are supposed to think.
Peng Zhang