To be honest, everybody is talking about responsive email design nowadays. Email service providers, marketing agencies and independent consultants as well. But is it just a new #buzzword or does it have a real value for you?
Most companies still do not optimize email for mobile
For example in the UK 61% of businesses do not have a mobile email strategy. Our personal experience is rather close to what Andrew King writes in his article, namely that 1 in 20 emails is responsive!
There’s usually a big difference between personal impressions and market statistics. I’m a fan of statistics and if I dive into a topic deeper, I can easily find US/UK stats about the same topic, but with really different numbers.
My personal experience is that only around 10-20% of emails are mobile optimized these days (and a lot of them are inbuilt Mailchimp templates). We don’t know the truth either, but this is not the most important question right now. At first, let’s understand how much are companies willing to invest in email?
How do companies optimize email for mobile (if they do)?
- Big international corporations, who send millions of emails/month, spend significant amounts of money on (mobile) email design, since 5% increase in CTR may mean an extra $100 000+ in revenue per year.
- Some Medium Sized Businesses, may look for a responsive email template, customize it or spend some hundreds of dollars on a custom built email template. But the majority won’t invest huge amounts of money to it.
- Most Small / Micro businesses do not really care. They just use the inbuilt templates of their email service provider.
Does responsive email design really worth the effort for every company?
To be able to answer this question properly we have to understand and investigate the efforts and the possible gains in terms of money. The cost of a responsive email template may vary from free, to thousands of dollars. But at first let’s figure out what is a realistic increase in CTR if you adopt responsive email design in your campaigns. Case studies from the web:
- Crocs.com: 7,6% increase in CTR
- Shopwss.com: 17,5% increase in CTR, 7,8% lift in conversions over a 3-month period
- Medscape.com: 53% higher CTR
- Deckers.com: 10% higher CTR
- Careerbuilder.com: 20% lift in CTR
- Unknown company: 113% boost in CTR
- Thrillist.com: 35% increase in CTR
The average figure would be 36,5% on the basis of the above mentioned case studies, but let’s be pessimistic instead and calculate with an average 10% increase in CTR and 5% in Conversions.
How much can a company earn with adopting responsive email design?
Here is a simple calculation, on the basis of our previous assumptions, which shows how much extra revenue can responsive email design mean to your business.
| **Huge Co.** | **Medium Co.** | **Small Co.** | **Micro** | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Email revenue / month | $100 000 | $10 000 | $1 000 | $100 |
| 5% CR increase | $5 000 | $500 | $50 | $5 |
| Extra income per year | *$60 000* | *$6 000* | *$600* | *$60* |
If you earn more than $10 000 per month from email marketing, you can happily spend thousands of dollars on responsive email design. Even small companies may spend some hundreds on a custom design or a professional responsive email editor tool – like EDMdesigner.com.
Even Micro Businesses should invest in responsive email design, since there are thousands of templates available for around $10 and for also for free as well.
Most people are afraid of change, and good at procrastinating. The responsive email revolution should start from email service providers. All of them should offer responsive email templates and proper email editors for their clients. Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and some others are really ahead of their competitors in this sense. We are here to help the rest with EDMdesigner, which is a drag and drop responsive email editor, available for integration into any system!
Responsive email design is not expensive, it’s totally affordable and it is highly likely to generate extra revenue for you!
Did we miss anything? Please comment and share your thoughts!
