Mobile Email Engagement Grows

August 25, 2015

This article is included in these additional categories:

Connected Device Comparisons | Digital | Email | Featured | Mobile Phone | Non-mobile Connected Devices | Tablet

Yesmail-Email-CTO-Rates-Desktop-v-Mobile-Q22013-Q22015-Aug2015Mobile devices have represented the majority of email opens for some time now, but studies have shown that PC users tend to click more than mobile users. That may now be changing, according to the latest quarterly report [download page] from Yesmail.

The study demonstrates that what had been a wide gap in click-to-open (CTO) rates between mobile and desktop users has shrunk this year. For the better part of the past 2 years, mobile click-to-open rates were roughly 50% lower than comparable rates on desktops, but that gap has halved in recent quarters. That’s the culmination of a trend that has seen mobile CTO rates grow by almost 30% over the past 2 years, while desktop CTO rates have declined by 18%.

Yesmail notes that the growth in mobile CTO means that consumers may not feel the need to re-open a message on a desktop, contributing to the decline in desktop CTO rates. Indeed, a recent BlueHornet survey of adults aged 18-64 found that, faced with an email on their mobile device that does not display correctly, one-third of consumers would save it until they could read it on a computer. (More than 4 in 10 would delete it, though.)

Data from the Yesmail study suggest that increasing engagement with mobile email is indeed tied to fewer emails lacking mobile optimization. In Q2, half of all emails sent were responsive, up from 28% a year earlier. Yesmail has previously shown that mobile email CTO rates are significantly higher for brands using responsive emails.

Add all of those trends up, and Yesmail reports that mobile clicks accounted for 46% of all email clicks in Q2, up from 35% share during the year-earlier period, and 27% of email-driven orders (up from 22% in Q2 2014). Tellingly, smartphones for the first time accounted for the majority of all mobile revenue (53%) and mobile orders (54%) for Yesmail’s clients. This shift may be due to the increase in responsive design adoption, as Yesmail has noted in the past that tablets had assumed the lead in mobile email revenue given that they were a more responsive-agnostic device.

It’s not just mobile engagement that has grown; Yesmail notes that overall, audiences appear more engaged, even as volume has grown. Indeed, Yesmail recorded 8 opens per opener in Q2, representing a 17% increase over the past 2 years. Moreover, the proportion of “never active” subscribers (those who have never opened or clicked on an email) dropped to 68.9%, an all-time low for Yesmail.

In other email-related research, a new Constant Contact study finds that mobile devices account for a majority 51% of opens, led by smartphones (39% share). Based on an analysis of more than 100 billion customer emails sent from Constant Contact in 2014 and 2015, the data shows that non-profit emails average higher open rates (29%) than their B2C (23%) and B2B (20%) counterparts. (In the Yesmail benchmarks, B2B has the lowest click-to-open rate of any industry.)

Other results from the Constant Contact study show that campaigns sent to Comcast Cable, Verizon Wireless and Cox Communications email addresses generated the highest open rates of any of the domain names analyzed, while those sent to AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts had the lowest open rates.

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