41% of emails were read on mobile last year

I got a fascinating email from the team over at Campaign Monitor, the email transmission / newsletter system people. They’ve produced a hugely valuable report based on the 22 billion emails (and 1.8 billion opens) that were sent through their system across 2013. 

The results are seriously compelling and if you’ve got even half an interest in the growth and development of mobile, it’s worth a skim, if not a full 10 minutes sitting and reading everything. 

According to the results, mobile is now the most popular platform for an email subscriber’s first interaction with email. That’s where it gets interesting though. The report goes on to highlight that routinely the first interaction is via mobile, but that further clicks actually take place on other platforms, showing that users do a lot of ‘triaging’ (i.e. “Yeah, ok, I’ll look at this later”). 

iPhone is everything when it comes to opens by mobile device. That device accounts for 61% of the mobile device opens seen by Campaign Monitor! Android devices are stuck down at 12%. iPad is a respectable 26%. Which means that Apple mobile devices (excluding laptops!) account for an ASTOUNDING 87% of all mobile device email opens. Absolutely shocking when you consider the runaway growth of Android around the planet. In case you’ve cause to doubt, that data is based on 780 *MILLION* mobile opens across over 2 million newsletter campaigns in 2013.

It’s not how big. It’s what you do with it, eh? 😉

Of course, this isn’t an objective measure of the whole mobile world, but it’s a very good ready-reckoner. 

I strongly recommend taking a closer look, especially around their rather in-depth analysis of opens and clicks on mobile devices. 

The report is right here: Email Marketing Trends 2013.