SAN FRANCISCO – Nine-year e-mail marketing veteran Tricia Robinson said mobile marketing is not quite there yet in the United States.
Premiere Marketing Automation Solutions, which bought Ms. Robinson’s employer Accucast last January, spent the summer expanding into the European market with an office in London and Munich. It found that mobile is the right medium for Europeans.
“In Europe the mobile device is king, so we have done a lot to optimize the features of how content appears in BlackBerries and on mobile phones,” said Atlanta-based Ms. Robinson. “It is not there yet in the U.S.”
Though the United States has not yet adopted the mobile tools of Europe and Asia, e-mail on BlackBerries is still a growing phenomenon.
Ms. Robinson found this out in 8 Thursdays, her group that comes together every Thursday to discuss new trends in the marketing field and publishes a white paper of findings that comes out on the ninth Thursday.
In the most recent paper, Ms. Robinson contributed a piece on how to make e-mails look good in multiple types of hand held devices. The key to doing this is by including a link in the message that reads, “View in Handheld” and linking this to a simplified text version of the message.
Keeping the copy brief and to the point makes the call-to-action simple to identify and convert. And to simplify this process even further, marketers can use the micro site functionality in Accelerator.
Other tips to the trade that were disclosed in the paper included encouraging consumers to add marketers to address books, testing and using background images effectively in e-mail templates.
“We put this white paper out for free because the tools are out there, but not all marketers know how to use them,” Ms. Robinson said.
