The number of emails being opened on mobile devices reached 36 percent in the first half of 2012, up from 27 percent in the second half of 2011, pointing to the need for marketers to include mobile in their email marketing strategies, according to a new report from Knotice.

The Mobile Email Opens Report for the first half of 2012 suggests that email is rapidly approaching the point when mobile email opens will exceed those opened on desktop, with Knotice forecasting that mobile opens will exceed 50 percent for most marketers within the next six to 12 months. The numbers also show that desktop email open rates have been steadily decreasing at the same time the mobile opens have been on the rise.

?Mobile email open activity is reaching the tipping point ? the point at which more email opens will occur on mobile devices than on desktop/laptop devices,? said Bryce Marshall, director of strategic services at Knotice, Akron, OH.

?Some retailers have already reached that tipping point and mobile users are their majority audience now in the email channel,? he said. ?Many retailers are unprepared for this ? and still more are ignorant to the fact this has occurred.

?For those that have not yet reached the tipping point, the trends show that it could be happening very soon. Retailers should have a sense of urgency about developing new email and online strategies and practices to better support and engage with the mobile audience.?

iPhone popular for email
The report underscores the need for marketers to begin planning now for the time when mobile users will be their largest email audience. This means altering fundamental design principles to accommodate the unique traits and preferences of mobile users, auditing post-click sites and pages for mobile friendliness and performance as well as creating moments of convenience so users can fulfill a call to action in as few clicks as possible.

Knotice?s research shows email opens on mobile phones represented 25.85 percent of all email opens and tablet 10.16 percent during the first half. The report is based in 807 million emails sent across 11 industry segments.

By operating system, iPhone accounted for 19.71 percent of email opens in the first half and Android phones 5.88 percent. On tablets, iPad accounted for 9.63 percent of email opens and Android 0.43 percent.

Desktop accounted for 63.99 percent of email opens during the same period.

While Android's share of email opens increased, the report points out that the activity does not correlate with the Android's high adoption rate, suggesting that the manner in which a mobile open is recorded may be skewing the results.

Email opens for mobile are measured based on downloading email images. However, since image download is not a default setting for some Android devices or mobile email clients, the reported number of opens may be lower than the actual number of users viewing or reading email.

Click-thru rates increase
By industry, consumer services and financial services saw the highest mobile open rates, at 33.99 percent and 32.72 percent respectively for phones.

Other strong industries include cable and telco with 25.71 percent, consumer products with 22.75 percent, education with 22.92 percent, entertainment with 26.48 percent, hospitality with 23.78 percent and retail with 24.43 percent.

While the email open rates for tablets were significantly lower, the retail sector notably had the highest open rate for tablets at 11.13 percent.

The report also points out that 36 percent of emails from retailers are opened exclusively on mobile, pointing to the importance of mobile optimization.

Click-thru rates for mobile phones and tablets also increased significantly in the first half, per Knotice. However, a lag in mobile and tablet click rates compared to desktop suggests that most email marketers are still not optimizing email content for mobile users.

Optimization for mobile devices should include rendering for mobile devices, streamlining text and making calls-to-action and buttons very clear, per Knotice.

?Conventional wisdom among many email marketers has been that a user will check their email on mobile devices but save emails to read later while they are on a desktop device,? Mr. Marshall said. ?And therefore, optimizing emails for mobile devices was not imperative because ultimately the quality interaction would occur on the desktop device.

?Our data indicates this conventional wisdom is inaccurate,? he said. ?Only a very small percent of opens are occurring on multiple devices.

? It is more likely that users are making decisions about whether to engage or respond to an email message the first time they encounter it in their inbox ? whether that?s on mobile device or not. Marketers have one shot to compel the user to respond.

The consumer services industry had the highest percentage of clicks on mobile phones at 23.88 percent. The lowest rate was delivered by business-to-business with 4.55 percent.

The retail segment's percent of mobile clicks was 13.83 percent.

?The results show that mobile should play a significant role ? if not the primary role ? for marketers as they develop their email strategies for the holidays and into 2013,? Mr. Marshall said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York