2015 Mobile-Friendly Email & Landing Page Trends [Infographic]

We’ve been sharing environment market share data and talking about the “Smartphone Threat” since way back in September 2011. Mobile email reading has grown swiftly since then, primarily at the expense of webmail.

While there are still some brands—including Litmus—with small mobile email audiences, most brands reached a critical mass of mobile email readers at least two years ago. That’s especially true when you consider that the first consumers to make this shift were probably brands’ more valuable subscribers.

Despite being many years into the Age of Mobile, marketers are still playing catchup when it comes to making their emails and websites mobile-friendly. Joint research between Litmus and Salesforce found that 56% of B2C brands use either responsive or mobile-aware email design, while the rest still use designs that are largely desktop-centric.

Our research, which we’ve summarized in the infographic below, also found disconnects in the subscriber experience when transitioning from emails to their associated landing pages. Fewer than half of brands have mobile-friendly emails that lead to mobile-friendly landing pages. That’s a big disconnect that deserves attention from both email and web teams.

The entire text of the infographic is also available below.

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Mobile-Friendly Email & Landing Page Trends

Consumers’ mobile email reading habits are well-established and while brands have been relatively quick to create mobile-friendly websites, marketers have been slow to adopt mobile-friendly email design techniques.

Email opens by environment

According to more than 1 billion email opens tracked by Litmus’ Email Analytics in June 2015, the percentage of email opens on each platform are as following:

• 48% Mobile
• 30% Webmail
• 22% Desktop

Email opens by environment: 48% mobile, 30% webmail, 22% desktop

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Website mobile-friendliness

The percentage of B2C brands with mobile-friendly website landing pages for their promotional emails are as followed:

• 85% in June 2015
• 74% in June 2014

Email mobile-friendliness

Looking at the percentage of B2C brands using a mobile-unfriendly desktop design vs. a mobile-friendly responsive or a mobile-aware design for their promotional emails, over the past two years:

• Desktop-centric designs have decreased
• Mobile-aware designs have remained relatively stagnant
• Responsive designs have increased

56% of B2C emails are now mobile-friendly—a 155% increase since October 2013

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For reference, these are the definitions used to define these three approaches:

• Desktop-centric design: 2+ columns, small text, and small, tightly grouped links and buttons
• Responsive design: Email content and layout adjusts to screen size of user’s device
• Mobile-aware design: Single column, large text and images, well-space links and buttons

Disconnect between mobile-friendly websites and emails

Emails lag websites in terms of mobile-friendliness by 29 percentage points, which creates disjointed subscriber experiences.

• 16% of mobile-friendly emails lead to websites that aren’t mobile-friendly
• 52% of B2C brands do not have emails and websites that are both mobile-friendly

Emails lag websites 29 percentage points in terms of mobile-friendliness

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Fix the disconnect!

1. Determine what percentage of your subscribers are reading your emails on mobile devices and which email clients they’re using.
2. If a significant portion of your subscribers are reading on mobile devices, adopt either mobile-aware or responsive email design.
3. If your emails are already mobile-friendly, work with your web team on a plan to create a mobile-friendly website.

Do you know your audience? When it comes to email marketing, it’s all about your audience. Use Litmus Email Analytics to discover which email clients are most popular with your subscribers. Sign up free! Discover your audience →

*“Email opens by environment” data is from Litmus’ Email Analytics. All other data based on observational research performed by the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Litmus involving more than 140 B2C brands using anonymous email clients.