Consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones to access emails, making it important for marketers to mobile optimize their email campaigns this holiday season.

A Radicati Group study found that 139 million people around the world will have accessed email via their handhelds in 2009 and this number is going to grow to more than 1 billion users by 2013. With mobile phone owners outnumbering PC owners four to one, industry experts were eager to give some best practices in terms of how to mobile-optimize email campaigns this holiday season.

?At the strategic level: First you should leverage next-generation technologies like MailboxIQ to automatically detect how many (and which) of your subscribers are opening your email on a mobile device and to identify which specific mobile platforms they are using to do so,? said Michelle Eichner, chief operating officer and vice president of client development at Pivotal Veracity, Phoenix.

?After you?ve done that, use email rendering preview technology to see how your email will actually look on the top mobile devices your customers are using, and implement tactics to ensure that your email is designed to look great on all of them,? she said.

Best practices
Here are some best practices for mobile email design optimization that every marketer should adhere to and share with their design teams, per Ms. Eichner.

? Verify your code for accuracy and W3C compliance
? Run your code through an HTML TIDY to take care of any trailing or open tags
? Be sure to send a TEXT part when sending a multi-part MIME
? Avoid using ?nested tables?
? Consider getting rid of your pre-headers as they can push your calls-to-action and branding further down the page and effectively OFF the first screen that the customer sees
? Avoid using very long subject lines as they will push your email down the screen by taking up too much header space
? Remember to use Alt-Tags in your image URLs, because not every mobile email client has images turned on by default
? Keep your emails small and light, because not every smartphone owner is flying along the 3G mega pipeline, nor are they all connected to Wi-Fi
? If you are linking to a mobile version of the email or a mobile site keep it under 20kb
? Test, test and test some more

?Personally I find that the busier I am, the more I?m on my device trying to take advantage of the five minutes waiting to pick the kids up or the idle time in shopping line-ups ? more holiday line-ups, more mobile activity,? said Deborah Hall, managing director of Web2Mobile, Toronto, Canada.

?There are three things that make a big difference in mobile optimization,? she said. ?First is resizing of images and links so that the content is organized well on the screen. Second, don?t just offer the full content version unedited. Create content that has less prose and more calls to action that make sense on the mobile device.

?Lastly, use calls to action that make sense in a mobile environment ? like click to call with one click users dial to interact on the go.?

Web2Mobile?s statistics indicate that 0.8 percent of emails are optimized for mobile devices, yet 20 to 30 percent of users are checking their email on devices. This gap represents a huge opportunity for email marketers.

Ms. Hall recommends including checkout coupon codes in mobile versions of the email and special offers. These coupon codes could be unique to the mobile version to measure the conversion rates.

Why mobile optimization?
Pivotal Veracity found that email marketers using MailboxIQ are already finding that 10 percent or more of their email is being opened on a mobile operating platform like iPhone, Android or Palm Pre.

These percentages will only grow, underscoring how important it is to mobile-optimize email campaigns.

Retailers are poised to be a major beneficiary of this trend for the holiday season.

A study issued by Deloitte consulting found that mobile phones are expected to be used by nearly 1 in 5 consumers to assist with their holiday shopping this season.

The same study found that consumers plan to use their phones to find store locations (55 percent), research prices (45 percent), find product information (40 percent), get discounts and coupons (32 percent) and read reviews (31 percent).

One in four even expect to make a holiday purchase directly on their phone.

?One of the biggest mistakes that CMOs and marketing departments make is measuring email?s ROI based on pure direct response results,? Ms. Eichner said. ?But a huge number of consumers also make in-store purchases after they get an offer that intrigues them in their email inbox.?

Epsilon?s 2009 Global Consumer Email Study backs Ms. Eichner?s statement up.

The study showed that 48 percent of adult Americans have responded to the emails they receive by making a purchase at a bricks-and-mortar outlet.

?With that in mind, smart marketers will take advantage of the combined power of email and mobile devices to send highly targeted offers that also make shopping easy for consumers this holiday season,? Ms. Eichner said.

?The great thing about the latest smartphones is that you can take your email, and any coupons or offers that you have in your inbox, along for the ride,? she said.

Smart marketers will send offers with customer-specific unique identifiers and bar codes that consumers can present at the register to receive discounts in order to drive incremental?and measurable mobile email driven sales, per Ms. Eichner.

Success stories
Pivotal Veracity claims that by designing emails that display elegantly on peoples? handhelds ? and not just on their PCs ? its clients have seen boosts in response, and sales, of 5 to 15 percent or more.

With the amount of information consumers get in their emails daily and their lack of attention increasingly, getting a marketing message across on the small screen can mean more revenue for businesses.

?We have relied on Pivotal Veracity?s eDesign Optimizer to ensure that our email campaigns render optimally on the platforms our customers are using, including popular mobile devices like Blackberry and iPhone,? said Claudia Lugmair, manager of eCommunications for Men?s Wearhouse, a Pivotal Veracity client.

?With the technology?s unparalleled breadth of coverage, we can rest assured we are designing marketing communications that really hit the mark in an age when consumers are accessing their email accounts across an ever-wider array of tools,? she said.

Web2Mobile?s client CMC Training is a provider of training and development in Canada.

Using Web2Mobile?s Email2Mobile product, CMC Training was able to reach its target audience in both of its newsletters and via follow-up communications where most of its audience is away from their desks.

?Email2mobile.ca is a tool that we have found effective at allowing us to cut through email clutter and deliver our messages in a user-friendly format even if our readers are away from their desk,? said Brad Sage, marketing manager at CMC Training, Toronto, Canada.