Email? Video? Websites? They’re all about the mobile.

 

By Bob West

 

The end of the first quarter brought a flood of digital media analysis reports to my in box, and they came from different people throughout our organization. One of our publishers sent me a “Global Video Index” report summarizing trends from 2014. A member of our marketing department sent me an email service provider’s “Q4 2014 Recap” report. Meanwhile, our own digital analytics guy has been putting a slew of trend reports from our own properties in front of me … and they all point to one unquestionable conclusion: Mobile matters more than ever.

Those of you reading this post most likely work in some agriculture or specialty ag market, which is good because our markets tend to lag behind broader Internet consumption trends to a degree. But make no mistake: your customers use mobile technologies to consume digital information more than ever, and your opportunity to engage these people will decrease without an effective mobile strategy.

Don’t believe me? Consider the following….

 

“Mobile clicks now account for almost 40% of all email clicks – a 10% increase year-over-year.” – Yesmail Interactive

 

Yesmail Interactive sends millions of consumer- and business-oriented emails every week for its clients. Their broad perspective stems from tremendous access to email data. They cite an increase in the use of responsive design in emails and adaptive landing pages as clear signs of marketers’ response to the mobile movement. (Two things we see very little of in ag marketing today.)

“Click-to-open rates for mobile emails jumped by 40% for marketers who use responsive design in all of their mailings compared to those who use it in none of their campaigns,” notes the company in its report, “The Season of Mobile.” “Implementing responsive or mobile-friendly formatting is the bare minimum marketers can do to cater to their mobile audience.”

 

“More than a third of all video consumed online was watched on a mobile device during [the fourth quarter of 2014].” – Ooyala

 

Ooyala is a video hosting / serving platform whose clients provided video content to more than 220 million viewers in 2014. Again, a tremendous amount of data. And mobile is the trend that stands out most of all to them.

“34% of all video plays in Q4 (2014) were on tablets and smartphones,” reports the company.

Ooyala went on to observe that the growth of mobile shouldn’t surprise any marketer today. The acceleration of this growth is another story, however, putting mobile devices on a collision course with the long-time king screen, the television. “As phone screens grow in size and quality, they are joining tablets to become the ‘screen of choice’ for viewers both young and old,” observes the company.

These reports come on the heels of Google’s announcement that it is changing its search algorithm to penalize websites that aren’t mobile optimized so that mobile viewers are directed to websites that will work with their device. (See our blog post here for more details on this big news.)

Clearly, only one conclusion can be drawn from all of this information – mobile matters more than ever. Meister Media has responded by re-building all of its websites on HTML5 to deliver the best mobile viewing experience possible, and work has begun on updating our enewsletter templates, too. You should likely be doing the same, too.

 

Bob West is Meister Media’s Director of Interactive Sales. He would be happy to talk about helping your company update its technology to meet the growing mobile audiences. Call him at 440/602-9129 or email him at [email protected].