Today MailChimp, the cool kids who know email over at Atlanta, have released a study: Email on Mobile Devices. While working on an email project over at SoundCloud, I’ve seen some other companies doing some efforts to display their transactional emails nicely on mobile. Then Campaign Monitor published a blogpost on how to make Twitters email notifications compatible on mobile. This proved my gut feeling, but I didn’t had the numbers.
Summary
While the research is not going so deep on the subject and the studies are quite simple, there are some things that I find worth noting:
While Return Path published a study saying Mobile email open rates increase with 34%, we now have a complete overview in this document.
Mobile email open rates increased 34% in the last six months of 2011, according to a study by ReturnPath. Compared to mobile, desktop email opens dropped by 9.5%. Similarly, email open rates via webmail decreased by 11%.
Boom! 34% increase in the second half of 2011, that means it should be a bigger number by now.
72% of the people we tested read their emails in bed.
I confess, I do that too. Frankly, while I disabled notifications, I read my emails everywhere. I’ll be looking more into email notification trends and hope to post my learnings here soon.
Oh and also, check out Mandrill, the transactional email platform MailChimp has launched lately; I really liked how two of their engineers were dogfooding the platform with their own pet project.