You Know Who Opens Your Emails on a Mobile Device. Now What?

You Know Who Opens Your Emails on a Mobile Device. Now What?:
However you got them, you now have reports on mobile device metrics for your email campaigns. The results are fascinating!  You are at first intrigued and delighted.  Then in dawns on you.  What in the world do I do with this information?
You may think that your immediate next step is to get serious about developing mobile versions of your email campaigns, like now.  Eventually, you’ll get there.  However, here are a few items you might want to consider adding to you priority list first.
Create and begin to track your key mobile segments. These should be unique to your audience, but here are a few suggestions:

• Mobile Ever – Anyone who has ever used a mobile device to open or click or has ever clicked on the “Mobile Version” link, if you have one
• Mobile Recent – Anyone who has used a mobile device in the past 30 days to open or click
• Mobile Frequent – Anyone who has used a mobile device at least five times to open or click, regardless of when the action occurred
• Mobile Active – Combines Mobile Recent and Mobile Frequent

For B2B, database sizes are often smaller and tracking four separate mobile segments may not make sense. In those cases, I recommend simply tracking either Mobile Active or Mobile Ever depending on which better applies in your situation. However, if you are feeling ambitious, layer title level into your segments as well (C-Level, VP, Director, Manager, Staff).
Educate yourself on mobile email design. Don’t just leave this to your graphic designer or email developer. Learn firsthand how mobile screen real estate compares to your current email content so that you can better inform your creative folks on how to best drive your message home. Litmus has a fantastic mobile infographic to help with this. Also a quick search of the word mobile at The Email Design Review yields several good articles on mobile email.
Finally, take some time to subscribe your competitors and favorite brands and review periodically to see what they are doing with mobile email. Incidentally, I could not find a single example of a brand which had truly optimized their emails for the mobile experience, based on my current subscription to the emails of over four hundred consumer brands. That doesn’t mean they aren’t working on it!
There were a handful of brands I found that, while they didn’t have mobile versions, provided an acceptable mobile experience. These include Costco News, Lowes, Caesars Entertainment, the Disney Store, and Ralph Lauren. Each provided a link to the hosted version of the email which fit the size of the mobile screen. Their designs included the use of larger images, so the user experience wasn’t terrible. Also, in the Ralph Lauren example, it took about a minute, but the animated gif used in their email also worked in my mobile device.
Until then, take some time to get to know (a) your mobile audience, (b) mobile email best practices and (c) your competition and the brands you follow.