Saturday, December 10, 2011

Mobile Marketing Fail

I love my iPhone. It is one of the best pieces of technology, if not the best, that I have ever owned. It really makes my life easier & better. Since iOS5 I moved all my email from Hotmail over to iCloud for better syncing between my phone and email account. Then, I got this email from Hotmail, saying that they have improved the iPhone experience.

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL


Honestly the email is good. Good subject line, simple design, clear, obvious calls to action, and they have made it pretty interactive with the like and dislike buttons. Being an iPhone user the most interesting part of this email was 'Hotmail on the go'.

They say "We've improved the Hotmail experience on all major smartphones including the iPhone". Being on my iPhone at the time, I was intrigued as to what these improvements could be. Had they fixed the sync issue? So I clicked the link and got taken to this wonderful page:


Despite claiming that they have made some improvements to their mobile mail application, the experience trying to actually see what those improvements are was a fail.

THE UN-FAILURE
I managed to see what the benefits really were when I got back on my PC, and they have not fixed the syncing issue yet, so the unfailure for this blog post is... iCloud mail. Well, that's part of it.

The main unfailure here is making sure that the mobile experience from your email marketing is as seamless as possible for the people who consume your marketing on their mobile devices. In a recent study conducted by Knotice, they found that mobile email opens accounted for over 20% of total emails opened. This shows why it's crucial that your email can be properly consumed on mobile devices.

This number is only going to grow as more and more people get smart phones and the phones themselves get better. Make sure you have a good email marketing template that works across multiple devices and that your landing pages are optimized for mobile users... especially if you are targeting your message directly at that audience!