In terms of sample size, statscounter.com have circa 16.3 billion web hits each month which they analyse and segment by country.

What I found interesting on the site was their mobile vs desktop graph which shows that 12 months ago 98.85% of all web hits within the sample came from desktop computers where as now its only 96.19%, what fills the gap? Mobile. Mobile usage is growing (1.15% of hits 12 months ago, now 3.81% of all web traffic sampled) and no doubt you will have seen countless blog articles about how important mobile is likely to be in your future marketing mix. Some of this trend will doubtlessly be due to the rise in social networking which is already fully integrated to mobiles devices like iPhone, iPad, Andriod, blackberry etc. but consumers email usage patterns are also changing. At least 5% of all email received is now read on mobile devices (Source: Gauge April 2010).

This got me thinking, what’s the trend within mobile itself? Which devices are growing?, which are fizzling out? and what is the future of mobile likely to be? Conveniently statscounter also had the answer.

Figure 1. All mobile platform usage over period 2009-10 to 2010-10

So what does figure one show? It shows traditional mobile operating systems like symbian (Nokia), Sony Ericsson and Samsung OS are on the decline whilst the new generation BlackBerry (RIM), Android and iPhone unsurprisingly are rapidly being adopted. So which of these are growing the fastest?

Figure 2. New Generation smartphone adoption over 12 months.

A week ago thenextweb.com posted an article on the US sales figures of these three big players for the 3rd quarter of this year. Their findings were that some 43.6% of smartphones sold in the US in the third quarter of 2010 were Android devices. Apple sold only 26.2% of the total US smartphones for the three month period. In terms of units thats 9.1 million Android units were sold vs 5.5 million Apple smartphones, whilst Microsoft managed to sell 3% of the overall market with their phone 7 offering.

This tallys quite well to the actual web traffic figures that statscounter.com publish, in the last 12 months blackberry has gone from 9% to 18% of traffic, a doubling in web traffic market share. Apple however has shrunk in its presence from 30% to 23%. Although more iPhone units are being adopted each day, iPhone adoption as a percentage is dropping. Losing out to blackberry and massively to Android which according to thenextweb.com is selling nearly double the number of phones in the US and whos smartphone web usage has shot up from 2.5% to 10.5% in 12 months, that’s an increase of over 400%.

Don’t expect this to slow either, as more handset manufacturers see the power that Android offers both their consumers and them as manufacturers more are and will continue to adopt android. Infact some of the lower end phones are now coming with Android OS installed.

What does this mean for marketers?

• Develop your mobile marketing apps across the three main platforms.

If you are thinking about creating a new app to promote your brand, make sure you develop it across all three platforms, and especially consider developing for Andoid, the smartphone marketplace is no longer a 1 horse race consisting of iPhones and as time goes on less of your potential customers will have access to your app if you don’t go multi platform.

• Test your emails on mobile

You likely already test your marketing emails on various webmail clients, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. You should start testing on mobile devices too, how does your email look to the 5% and growing people who are opening your email on their phones?

• Consider investing in mobile marketing.There are many geosocial applications out on the market place now like facebook places, foursquare, geomium. which allow you to target people based on their location, if they are near one of your shops, let them know why they should visit. More and more potential customers going forward will have the capability to receive this form of advertisement as smartphones continue to be adopted in large numbers.

Further update: March 2011 figures briefly reviewed.

Google have updated the Gmail website to detect iPad’s and to hide the inbox messages on the side and make more of the compose screen which is now visible immediately.

Below: The iPad showing the new Gmail compose window.

To try out Gmail on the iPad, just go to gmail.com in Safari. Please note that the new interface is only available in US English at the moment and google have not confirmed plans to roll this out in other languages.

Target audience

Lets think for a moment about the iPad’s target audience, business or home user?

Without a doubt the iPad’s target market is predominately the home user. Likewise their mac’s, mac books and iPhones are aimed at home users. Yes sure there are business users, but predominantly the target market and where Apple excel most is the home user.

What does this mean for email marketers?

The iPad is designed to be mobile, this allows home users to use it sitting comfortably on the sofa browsing or whilst commuting and enables them to email and use apps whilst relaxed. It is not designed to be used at a desk, for answering email after email and therefore the user is likely to be more relaxed and have more time to absorb your brand message. If a user opens their email they are less likely to be short of time and more likely to engage with the content provided its relevant and targeted to them. Arguably mobile devices offer the same and for sure mobile use of email is increasing month on month but the iPad offers an unparaelled experience where the web is not compromised by smaller screens, incompatible webpages and emails and consequently we expect to see higher engagement on the iPad than the current mobile devices.

HTML 5 Standards Support including video in email

The iPad uses the standard apple webkit to render emails, this means that if you currently test your emails on Apple Mac’s or iPhones your email is likely to display identically in the iPad as it uses the same rendering engine.

In addition to supporting modern web standards the iPad offers images on be default as soon as an email is opened, and even in the preview pane. For email marketers this means opens are tracked from the moment the email is displayed within the large preview screen without having to have the user click or enable images for your email.

The apple webkit also has HTML 5 support, which along with being able to render images on the fly has native video support. Yes, this means video in email without using third party products such as goodmail certified video or having to use a streaming server and relaying on third party components being installed remotely on the device displaying the webpage or email.

Size of the market

Within 12 months of the iPhone launch the market penetration grew to be over 4% of people using email. Most of these people combine their use with another device but if your email didnt look interesting to start with on the iPhone the chances are it got deleted and never reached the PC/Mac which traditionally you may well have been designing for.

If iPad usage grows in a similar fashion we may well find that close to 10% of all emails we send will either be opened by an iPad or other mobile device users. The Email Manual advise is that you start testing your emails on mobile devices as this is becoming a huge proportion of your potential customer base and if your emails don’t work properly on these sorts of clients you are likely to find the subscriber emotionally unsubscribing from your emails. Emotional unsubscribes result in more spam complaints, less converted prospects and ultimately less revenue from your email marketing campaigns.

Do you have an Apple iPad already? Would love to hear your feedback specifically around how it handles email.

The new hotmail makes major advancements by integrating with Microsofts cloud based skydrive (allowing people to send upto 10gb attachments) to share videos, images etc as well as competing with googlemail by allowing users to modify their powerpoint and office documents online.

Other new features include:

• Social email highlights: Hotmail identifies and categorises emails from social networks like facebook in your inbox, making it easier to sort through your emails.
• One click filters: Filter your entire inbox to only show messages from specific contacts or companies.
• Sweep functionality: A virtual brush that allows people to easily remove or file emails from a specific sender in their inbox into folders. Auto-sweep can archive any future emails from that sender so they do not appear as clutter in the inbox automatically.
• Optional conversation view: Hotmail gives people the option to view messages by threaded conversation to view an entire conversation series in one go.
• Advanced search and automated search suggestions. Hotmail has added an advanced search pane and made advanced search easy with inbox search auto-complete.  People can type a single letter into the search box and Hotmail automatically suggests a number of searches to help people find the email they are looking for.
• Enhanced support for mobile users. Mobile browsing is optimised for the latest round of smartphones like the iPhone allowing seemless browsing as if you were on your computer.

In addition there is the new “Microsoft active view” which enables you to view specific content directly within the email body such as YouTube videos, Flickr photo albums, and Linkedin notifications.

The new hotmail will first be released to Austrialian users within a few months and will then be spread to the rest of the globe.

A preview of the new hotmail features is available below:

As announced on the SURBL-Announce list: “An experimental source of some snowshoe and pill domains is now being published in xs.surbl.org.  SURBL considers this feed to be experimental and would very much welcome feedback about it, particularly about any false positives.  Does anyone know anyone who actually wants to receive snowshoe messages?”

You can read the entire announcement here.

So what’s different about this blacklist/blocklist?

Most blacklists or blocklists are IP based, e.g they contain a list of computers and servers which have sent spam in the past. However because of the increased use of botnets (compromised computers) to send spam SURBL have for a while now maintained a list of websites advertised within spam messages. This allows mail administrators to add another useful tool to their content filtering e.g check for known websites known to be associated with spam.

SURBL claim that using these types of lists combined with traditional blocklists upto 95% of spam can be blocked.

This particular blocklist from SURBL focuses on pill and snowshoe websites.

If you are not already doing all of these 5 p’s you really should reevaluate your email marketing and ensure that you make your emails personal. I strongly agree that the more personal you make your email campaigns, the more sucessful they will be. Use the customers name, use dynamic content based on what you know about your subscriber already. Move away from an email ‘blast’ and move towards a 1-1 customer relationship. Email is a very effective method to include in your marketing mix to achieve this.

The biggest change between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 is that 2007 no longer uses Internet Explorer is its rendering engine, instead it uses Microsoft Word to render emails which it receives.

The problem with this is that Word is much less flexible, has less support for commonly used html code and CSS style sheets.

For a full list of things that Outlook no longer supports please see the Microsoft article on Outlook 2007 which was published.

The highlights are:

• No support for animated GIFs (moving image files) – Despite Microsofts quote here saying that “GIF is a widely supported Internet standard.”
• Macromedia Flash
• background images
• Forms
• alt tags in images

This has not been popular amongst the Email Marketing community of designers.

However as Outlook 2007 has such a big market share it is not practical for Email Marketers to do nothing. Unfortunately therefore, marketers need to review their campaigns and email templates to ensure they still display reasonably well within Outlook 2007.

Here are some ideas and tips from Email Manual on how you might choose to address these changes.

• Send a copy of your email templates and campaigns to a copy of Outlook 2007 to test them before you send your live campaigns.
• Use a service such as litmus to test your templates in all common browsers/email clients.
• Ask your ESP to review your templates, make suggestions for increased compatibility with email clients including Outlook 2007.
• Ask your ESP to review and fix your templates for Outlook 2007 (This is likely to be chargeable, check pricing with them.)
• Use this as an oportunity to review your emails against your marketing objectives, have they become to complex, cluttered? Perhaps this is just what you needed to take your emails back to basics and realign your templates with your marketing objectives, perhaps even a complete redesign?

Approximately half of all consumers have images turned off by default according to a study by the email experience council.

This statistic shows that marketers need to ensure they are using text effectively within their email marketing content in addition to images. Having text with a call to action or targeted offer will encourage the reader to allow images to be displayed within their email which will also register as an email open if you use email open tracking and failing to do this may result in your email being simply deleted or worse, the “this is spam” button being clicked.

One of the easy wins, if you do not want to redesign your content is to use alt tags. These are html snippets within your email which will show a word or sentence when an image can not be displayed. By doing this you give your subscribers who block images by default a chance to decide whether the content is relevant to them and allow the images to display. Without text surrounding your images or alt tags your subscribers will only see empty boxes where your images were supposed to be and this will result in your email not being read and just deleted.

Seems simple enough? We thought so too but surprisingly in a separate study titled ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ from the email experience council showed that :-

“Only 42% of the 104 top online retailers included in our study designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% used alt tags adequately or extensively.”

Email Manual recommendations:

• Use a good mix of text and images, don’t include your text within the images.
• Use alt tags for your images where appropriate.
• Trial sending your emails with embedded images rather than linked *

* N.B the figure you should look at here will be your clickthrough or conversation rates and not your open rate, if the images are embedded within the content and the only image that is linked is the open tracking image then users will not see the need to allow the image through and therefore you can reasonably expect a slightly reduced open rate but you may also see a higher clickthrough and conversion rate.

If you want to see more results from the ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ you can read the executive summary here.