Smartphone adoption is rapid and continuing to grow. To date, mobile email adoption has been primarily among young, affluent business users. However, the demographic of smartphone users is changing due to the decreasing cost of these devices. Therefore, B2C email marketers should prepare now for a wider demographic set to adopt smartphones within the next six months. To address this growing adoption, email marketers need to understand the key characteristics of email on the ‘third screen.’

ExactTarget’s research reveals three key findings for email marketers to consider as they address challenges presented by mobile email.

1. Smartphone users employ mobile email to stay informed. Users are more engaged in reading email than writing email on their mobile devices and are primarily interacting with messages they deem urgent, not commercial email.

2. Access to email on mobile devices is not better, just convenient. Limited functionality and rendering capabilities on many smartphones keep users loyal to their desktops and/or laptops. These users often go back to feature-rich computers to act on the messages they receive.

3. There are no adopted standards for rendering of email on mobile devices. Based on the lack of standards on the way people interact with email on their mobile devices, and on real-world testing, we recommend the use of multi-part MIME and conscious optimization of text email versions in the short term to combat the
challenges presented by mobile devices.

The mobile landscape is evolving rapidly. Likewise, best practices associated with delivery of email to mobile devices will evolve rapidly. This whitepaper provides a comprehensive state of the market as of July 2007 to serve as a foundation for informed advancement of best practices in this fast growing email marketing segment.