Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Jordie van Rijn, the founder of emailmonday.

The use of email on mobile devices is growing. More and more people are reading personal and commercial emails on their smartphones while stuck in traffic, watching tv, or even during business meetings. Mobile email statistics say that you can expect 10 to 30% of email opens to originate from a mobile device. Email Service Providers are taking notice and publish their findings in freshly compiled reports – you can see a full breakdown here. However, the statistics are not that clear and are leading to a great deal of confusion.

If you are looking at statistics about mobile email, consider the following:

• Some use the total mobile open rates per campaign, while other speak of unique open rates. This causes a difference
• The term mobile email users isn’t defined yet. It can means the recipients that have opened an email on a mobile device for a particular brand in a particular period (like per month or per half year). Same reports use mobile email users and call it mobile opens.
• ESPs have the data of multiple brands, their mobile users can be the ones that have opened a an email on a mobile device crossing all brands in a particular period.
• Growth figures don’t take the monthly differences into account, a half years growth is skewed by “mobile friendly” periods like the holidays.
• A person that clicked on a link has also opened the email, even if he didn’t load the pictures. So open rates are based on loaded images + clickthroughs. But the clickthrough rates on mobile devices are different.
• The term mobile devices and smartphones are used interchangeably, but mobile devices also includes tablets like the iPad.
• Surveys are also used to compliment data, like questions about the number of times people check their email on their mobile phone. These surveys usually misrepresent the actual behaviour (although they can give a good trend indication).
• Android phones have images turned off on default, so their registered open rates are much lower than for instance the iPhone. This has nothing to do with market share. So pie diagrams of opens per device are always skewed. Many of the mobile email users are also opening your emails on their android, they are just not loading the images.
• Reports are defined by the data available. Mobile usage, open rates and types of smartphones used differ heavily per country.
• Mobile email open rates also differ per day (and time) the emails are sent. A particular brands sendtime can influence the opens, next to the impact the brand, their email list and the messages have by themselves.
• Email service providers use their own data. The outcome is influenced by their clients client base. So numbers between different types of ESPs are bound to be different.
• Users are also seeing your email on a webclient on their mobile browsers, these are difficult to differentiate from normal email openers and hardly ever reported.

As you can see there is more to a single statistic than the eye can see, especially if it is transformed into an Infographic. But let’s not let this distract us. The use of mobile email is growing and that is a fact. For marketers this means that they have to take mobile platforms seriously, and if they haven’t already taken action, to develop a mobile email strategy.

About the Author

Jordie van Rijn is Founder at emailmonday. View the full bio here.

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