The Secret Of Responsive Email (part 2)

Segmentation

Habits and devices

Back in the day we consumed emails mainly on desktop PCs, using some of the major and most dominant email clients. Thanks to the development and the appearance of new IT players more and more email clients and operating systems show up. This results in new email clients with many different versions which people eventually started to use and still continue to do so.

In the past two decades many players entered the market with different, sometimes brand new platforms. These were televisions, consoles and handheld devices with many different features and screen sizes. Certainly it is too early to talk about mass email consumption on TVs, and it is questionable if we ever will, but handheld (mobile) devices revolutionized the way we read emails, for sure.

The trend is super clear: people consume more and more email on mobile than on desktop or webmail. However, it is important to measure how the general trends and email reading habits are translated into your own specific target audiences (namely your subscribers).

source: Litmus.com

The players of the mobile market

source: Netmarketshare.com

Based on these international statistics the market leader is iOS, than Android is the next dominant platform, while Windows Phone is lagging behind. The chart represents very well how the two competing platforms, based on their continuous updates are leading to a unified, serviceable market.

iOS versions: Mixpanel.com

source: Android.com

Apple users usually upgrade to the latest and greatest iOS, since they are “almost” forced to do so. In case of Android the fragmentation is a tough issue, since there are almost 12.000 different Android devices in the market, from 600+ manufacturers.

The speed of progress

While a new update on the iOS platform spreads like fire with its pull mechanism, the Android platform usually gets updated only if we switch devices. The Android users tend to update their devices less frequently, moreover some of them never even consider doing it. However, to predict the future we must note that in quartely sales, Andorid has 80% market share, which will eventually lead to the #1 position in the global market.

Every market is different

If you dig deeper into the local stats you can better understand how much the international trends are applicable to your case. In case of smaller countries it is usually hard to Google for proper stats, but you should try to do so. Generally US stats are good for checking out trends, but don’t focus on the exact numbers, because you might confuse yourself.

Market share of email clients

It must be noted that when we are diving deeper into this topic we are stepping into a very uncertain filed. Taking the above covered analysis into account we can see that markets can be very diverse. Beyond the basic structure of each market it is sociologically proven that users can behave in very different ways when using a product. To further complicate this, it is very common to use different solutions and devices based on where we are at a certain point during our day. One of the biggest public surveys by Litmus analyze the TOP10 most used email clients on a monthly basis. They compile their analysis based on 230 million email openings every month. The numbers show a worldwide trend which could be very different from a certain geo-location’s data.

source: Emailclientmarketshare.com

Measure your market!

The last part of our responsive email design series will be published next week on our blog, with some coding tips as well. But generally our aim with EDMdesigner is to take care of coding and testing for you. If you wanna be informed about our next posts please follows us on Twitter or on Facebook, or subscribe through RSS (the good, old way)!