There’s a tendency with email marketing to get caught up in the technology, worrying about responsive design, scalability, smartphone devices and tablets. And all rightly so, the figures for open rates on non-desktop devices are rising at a frightening rate, but the concern is that people are focussing so much attention on being adaptive they forgot about the thing that makes the email worthwhile – the content.
The interesting development with the mobile statistics numbers is quantifying them. A study published by the direct marketing association showed that while mobile readership is on the rise, that over two thirds of mobile readers would wait until they’re on a laptop to purchase a product advertised to them in an email.
While part of email marketing is certainly about creating adaptive and versatile designs that will create an email viewable on any device, it would be wrong to lose sight of what really matters – great content. Fretting over technological advances like smartphones and even changes to how Gmail sorts its inbox actually doesn’t change the fact that you will succeed or fail based on what’s in your email, not how it looks.
Great content is the key thing that links all forms of digital marketing together. Regardless of how well or badly some of the elements of your marketing are, if you give people content that keeps them coming back for more, you’ll have no issues. Obviously, you want to get those elements right, but content is the key.