If you’re involved in email marketing, you’ve likely heard about the rising number of mobile users viewing emails, and the challenges in designing for such devices. A few years back, “optimizing for mobile” meant offering a text-only version of your emails, but the browsers used on today’s smart phones have made mobile users much more likely to receive HTML versions of your messages.
But before you panic at the prospect of designing for those tiny screens, it’s important to get a read on how your audience is using mobile. After all, just because one marketer’s list is heavy with mobile users doesn’t mean that your audience fits the same mold.
If you’re using SubscriberMail’s Google Analytics integration to track email visitors to your website, here is a quick way to see how many of those email visitors are using mobile devices. When viewing a site profile in Google Analytics, there are two options for Mobile under the Visitors menu—Mobile Devices (iPhone, Android, etc) and Mobile Carriers (Sprint, Verizon, etc). Either option should display the same visitor data, it’s just a matter of preference if you want it broken down by Device or Carrier. The data displayed will represent all Mobile traffic to your site, but by selecting Source from the dropdown menu directly above the first column of data, you can filter the results based on the traffic source. By default, the Source for your email traffic will be listed in Google Analytics as SubscriberMail. Just look for the SubscriberMail listing, and that will show you how much of your total mobile traffic is being referred from your SubscriberMail emails.
It should be noted that mobile users who viewed one of your emails without clicking any links will not be factored in to any Google Analytics traffic totals. That being said, getting an idea of how many of your engaged subscribers are using mobile devices can provide valuable insight into how high-priority of an item mobile optimization should be for your email program.
