BOING!

That was the sound of your email bouncing.

As a publisher, or anyone involved in email marketing, you might feel there is no worse sound. Except there is. It’s the sound of silence.

It’s the silence of your email never even reaching the recipient’s servers - or reaching the mailbox, and being swiftly and silently escorted to the spam folder by the automatic filters. Because there was no BOING! - you never know.

The percentage of sent emails that actually make it to the inbox (your deliverability rate), is the metric by which email campaigns and email newsletters live or die. It’s not just related to that one email, either. One email campaign with outstandingly bad deliverability (think 40-50% of your emails never made it to their destination) and your future campaigns start with a mark against them.

Last post, we experienced the hard knock of the following statistics:

“45% of consumers have unsubscribed from a brand’s promotional emails because the brand’s emails or website didn’t display or work well on their smartphone.” -Litmus, 2016

“34% of consumers have marked a brand’s promotional emails as spam because they didn’t display or work well on their smartphone.” -Litmus, 2016

Like it or not, fair or not: sending mobile-unfriendly emails is now an unpardonable offense.

If you send emails to your consumers, brace yourself for the following statistic.

“45% of consumers have unsubscribed from a brand’s promotional emails because the brand’s emails or website didn’t display or work well on their smartphone.” -Litmus, 2016

Survived that one? Don’t relax yet - it gets worse.

When it comes to mobile email, you as a publisher have tremendous opportunity - and tremendous competition, as we saw last week.

91% of smartphone users check email on their cell phones at least once a day (and many users spend a lot of their mobile device time on email.

But almost 90% of publishers are involved in email marketing. The competition for your readers’ attention is stiff. How are you going to win?

“It shouldn’t be called a smartphone. It should really be called a “smart-inbox.”
- Dave Hendricks, President of LiveIntent

With a little calculation of the time you spend on your smartphone, you can probably see where he’s coming from. How much time do you spend per day on your smartphone making phone calls? Okay, now how much time do you spend on your smartphone checking your email? Hmmm…. If you’re like 91% of smartphone users, you check email at least once a day - and probably more.