What does your website or email look like on a mobile device? We know, do you?
After a great summer hiatus, a co-worker pointed out to me that it is post Labor Day (pre-Columbus Day) and high time for me to start blogging again. Conveniently, we’ve got some interesting news to share.
I’ve done this a few times now when I present to companies about their mobile marketing strategies. I ask everyone to take out their smartphone. People reach into their bags and pockets and pull out the usual mix of Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids. Then I ask them if they have ever used the web browser on their smartphone to go to their company’s website.
Click, click, click….and…groan. In most cases, the results are pretty ugly (and often distracting from the rest of my presentation!). Pile on top of this problem that most of us are also picking up our emails on these devices. Ever see one of your marketing emails rendered on a mobile device? It ain’t always pretty.
“Even if you don’t have a mobile strategy, your customers are going to read your email and go to your website from their mobile devices.”
So what’s a marketer to do? Fortunately Unica has some capabilities that can help optimize the mobile customer experience. As you might know, earlier this year Unica acquired leading deliverability vendor Pivotal Veracity. You might be using the PV products embedded as part of the deliverability services from your ESP, as part of Unica’s email solution – eMessage, or perhaps you’ve purchased PV stand-alone. They have a very cool capability to render a preview of what an email will look like on a variety of email clients – including various mobile devices!
Last week we announced new functionality for the PV product line that extends the preview rendering capability to web pages (in addition to emails). PV can now correctly display the full gamut of mobile devices, web browsers, and other means of access, like the iPad. Why make this part of an email product line? What good is a beautifully rendered email when the landing page it leads to displays poorly within that browser on your mobile device? Think of it as helping optimize the “post-click” email experience.
Two Simple Tips for Getting Started with this Accidental Strategy:
- Find out which devices your customers are using to read email (and when) and web pages. For your website, most web analytics solutions including our own NetInsight can report on this. For your emails, ask your ESP if they include PV MailboxIQ which provides similar functionality for emails. This can help you understand if you have a problem and quantify just how big it is.
- As part of our new post-click landing page rendering, we are offering a free preview rendering that will let you see exactly what your website or landing page looks like on an iPad! Check it out here.
So, what do you think about the mobile strategy you didn’t even know you had?
