• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, June 6, 2016

Women are driving the switch to a mobile-first Internet -- and in so doing, they are also at the forefront of mobile email adoption. New research from the body that regulates UK online audience measurement, UKOM, is based on comScore data and shows that women spend nearly half of their Internet time -- 49% -- on smartphones, compared to men, who spend just 39% on mobile. In contrast, men spend 48% of their Internet time on a computer, compared to just 35% for women.

UKOM provides several examples of specific activities to help advise marketers what women are doing on their smartphones more than men. These include devoting more than three hundred additional minutes per month to social compared to men -- as well as just over one hundred more minutes on retail and just under one hundred more minutes to gaming.

Delve a little deeper with the UKOM guys and it turns out that although the difference is not as extreme, women interact with email for just over a hundred million more minutes per month than the industry average. Per individual, it means that women spend seven minutes more per month on a smartphone checking email compared to men.

So the takeaway for email marketers is that women are now spending very nearly half their online minutes on smartphones, and one of the areas where they give more attention to the small screen than men is email. This is proof -- if it were needed -- that email marketers are correct to assume that campaigns reaching out to women in particular need to be smartphone-led.