A couple weeks ago I dug deeper into a survey we conducted last year on the use of mobile email for a presentation at the Email Insiders Conference. In the course of that evaluation I came across an interesting trend that has not entered into discussions about mobile email--that there is a significant segment of users who maintain "mobile only" email addresses.
Most of the discussion on mobile email has focused on people who access the same email from their mobile device that they access from their primary email account. In that scenario, the mobile inbox simply becomes a different access point for email--people may read the same email on their mobile device that they read when they get back to home or office. Thus, maintaining the integrity of email rendering for the desktop/laptop computer is critical. However, now we see that there is a very large group of people who maintain mobile only email addresses that they never access from a desktop/laptop computer.
Here is the breakdown from our survey:
52% of mobile email users access same email account on multiple devices (Skews toward the BtoB Crowd)
- Tend to be younger (25-44)
- More technically savvy
- Employed full-time
- More affluent
48% maintain a separate mobile email account (Skews toward the BtoC Crowd)
- Tend to be older (45+)
- Retired and homemakers
- Less affluent
Unfortunately, we do not have information on whether people use these mobile only addresses when subscribing to newsletters and other commercial email, or if they are used primarily for personal communication. I suspect that when people have a choice, they don't give their mobile only address--but that is only speculation. However, for some less affluent consumers, mobile devices offer an affordable access point to the internet. For people who do not have regular access to the internet from home or work, this means that the primary email address these consumers maintain is mobile only, which would require us to think differently about best practices for collecting information from and emailing to these segments.
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