Last Minute Strategic Year-End Email Appeal Tips
The Case of the Incredibly Shrinking Technology
My last post was about email, and how it’s not going away any time soon despite the ascension of social media. We have to do both. In fact, we have to do offline mail as well. Most of us don’t like this fact. We have to work longer and harder than ever just to keep up with all the media channels. It’s a fact of life. And it’s about to get worse.
In The Age of Mobile Email Has Arrived. Are You Ready? technology strategist Cameron Lefevre points out it’s likely one-quarter of our subscribers are reading our emails on their mobile phones, and this number is growing quickly . No big deal, right? Wrong.
Our constituents’ propensity to get up and go – and take their email with them – often means that the content and links we slaved away at simply got up and went. Similarly, our constituents’ willingness to engage with us while on the go – staring at teeny screens and links the size of a fingernail, scrolling up and down and using their thumbs to click and engage – also left the room.
The less-than-pleasant mobile phone experience (we love them; we all complain about them) can negatively affect how our supporters engage with our email – unless we go the extra mile to make their experience supremely customer-friendly.
Let’s consider the challenges faced by mobile users, and how this impacts their behavior. Recent research among national nonprofits found that mobile phones accounted for between 12% and 17% of emails opened. However, mobile users were less likely than desktop users to take the next steps of clicking and donating or taking action. Mobile users were reading – but they weren’t engaging as much as desktop users. They would only account for 5% of those who actually made a donation online.
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Now, let’s consider a solution: making our emails and landing pages look great and be easy to use on mobile. Most of us don’t have a clue how to do this, but hopefully we’ve got tech support that does know. If not, the folks at M+R Strategies have provided us with a nifty ‘how-to’ with step-by-step instructions and before and after examples. The results are visually striking. Not only that, when the mobile-optimized versions of email were tested against non-optimized versions of the same email, the optimized versions resulted in greater click-through success.
And it’s not just email, but also e-newsletters, blogs and websites that are being viewed on phones. We should optimize all of these for mobile (and there are numerous examples on the web, from Campaign Monitor’s review of how they optimized their eNewsletter to simple tips on Mashable and Social Media Examiner . And do check out Katya Andreson’s recent post on Connection Café regarding 4 Questions to Ask Before Going Mobile.
Ask your tech support staff to help with the optimization, or simply outsource this and get someone on it sooner rather than later. Otherwise, you’re going to be missing a large chunk of your audience. You may be able to control the day/time you launch an email, but you can’t control where your constituents will open the email. If they’re on the go, you’ve got to go after them. Good luck!
Comments are welcomed below. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom, experience and questions.
