32% of smartphone owners have made a purchase after receiving a promotional message on their mobile device via email, according to results from a StrongMail survey conducted by Forrester Consulting, released in August. The study also finds that smartphone owners are far more likely to have made a purchase after receiving a promotional message via email than via SMS (9%) or in-app messaging (6%).
Promotional messages – however delivered – appear to have a far greater influence on smartphone than standard mobile phone owners. Only 10% of standard mobile phone owners said they had made a purchase after receiving a promotional message on their device via email. Just 3% could say the same about a message received via SMS, and only 1% via in-app messaging.
Overall, 23% of the total respondent base said they had made a purchase after receiving a promotional message on their device via email, and 6% had done so after receiving an SMS. A Placecast survey released in August also found mobile phone owners displaying greater receptiveness to email than SMS marketing. Among respondents, 14% of parents (and 10% of consumers without children) said they had made a purchase on their mobile phone in the past year due to email marketing, compared to 9% and 3%, respectively, who had purchased something due to a merchant text.
Smartphone Owners Make Quick Decisions About Emails
When asked what they do with a promotional email they receive on their device, 40% of the smartphone owners surveyed by StrongMail said they open it and then either delete it or decide to open it again later on a different device. By comparison, 23% wait to open it on another device with a larger screen, and only 1 in 5 open, read and click through on their device when presented with an interesting offer.
82% of the smartphone owners surveyed said they access email on their mobile device. By contrast, just 20% of the standard mobile phone owners surveyed access email.
Most Smartphone Owners Comfortable Interacting With Brands
Details from “Consumer Perceptions of Mobile Marketing for StrongMail” indicate that roughly 6 in 10 smartphone owners interact with brands on their mobile device, compared with just 15% of standard mobile phone owners. The main challenges that smartphone owners encounter when interacting with brands include: links to websites that aren’t optimized for mobile viewing (28%); email templates that aren’t optimized for mobile viewing (28%); and network connectivity or slowness (24%). Slightly less than one-quarter say they don’t experience any challenges.
About the Data: The StrongMail data is based on a survey of 322 general population consumers, conducted by Forrester Consulting in June 2012.
