• by Jess Nelson , March 20, 2017

Email marketing is an increasingly mobile channel according to a new study by MessageGears, which reveals that consumers are engaging more and more with email content on their smartphones.

Desktop email engagement has declined over the past two years as mobile engagement has risen, according to the MessageGears. The Atlanta-based email marketing technology company analyzed the open and click-through rates of its enterprise customers between the first quarter of 2015 and the end of 2016 to investigate the ways that consumers engage with promotional email campaigns.

The percentage of overall email opens occurring on a mobile device has increased 7% since the beginning of 2015, according to the study, and the majority of email engagement now occurs away from a desktop computer. Only 41.7% of email clicks occurred on a desktop computer, whereas 47.5% of email clicks were derived from a mobile device.

“We can surmise that people are now spending more time on their mobile phones,” writes Will Devlin, director of marketing at MessageGears, in a blog post about the study. “Consumers are more comfortable checking email and surfing the Web on their phones as well. There’s also the rise in the adoption of responsive design. This makes reading emails and Web sites easier and more pleasant on a smaller screen.”

Devlin recommends that marketers critically consider how to engage with email subscribers via mobile device. Considering how mobile customers are on the go and likely have shorter attention spans, MessageGears suggests that marketers prioritize more visually stimulating content as opposed to strictly text-based messages. Multimedia elements and shorter subject lines that can display on a smartphone screen were further recommendations for email marketers who are looking to curate more mobile-driven content.

“If you are thinking about how to target mobile users with your campaigns, testing will continue to be critical,” writes Devlin.

A/B testing, or split testing, compares two or more versions of the same message to investigate which version performs better. A/B testing can be used in Web site design and mobile app development, but it can also be leveraged in email marketing to test what email subject line or body text evokes the best reactions from subscribers.