5 steps for making your emails mobile friendly

Here is something I’ve posted as part of a series on mobile marketing for The Bowditch Group.

If you’re thinking “mobile marketing isn’t relevant to my business” then you are dead wrong. If you’re dealing with anyone that might potentially check their email from their phone then mobile marketing is important to you. Today, almost everyone deals with clients that use BlackBerrys, iPhones or any other type of mobile that lets them easily access their email. Some people have been booking a third seat at a restaurant for their partners BlackBerry.

You must make sure these people can read your email on their phone.

Put yourself in the mind of someone reading your email from their phone. They’re either sitting on public transport, rushing between meetings or out and about. They need to be able to quickly digest whatever it is you send them.

Here are X tips to make sure the emails you send are mobile friendly:

1. 1. Keep your emails brief and clear. This should go without saying but becomes even more important if someone is reading your email from their mobile.
2. Resize your images to be no more than 300 pixels wide. This is slightly smaller than the width of the iPhone. Doing this means the reader doesn’t need to zoom in or out.
3. Check your signature shows up nicely on a mobile. Send an email to yourself, friends or colleagues and see how it looks. You may want to do a bit of tweaking.
4. Keep paragraphs short. On your laptop or computer a paragraph can be many sentences long. On the mobile a 3 or 4 sentence paragraph can mean A LOT of scrolling. By breaking your sentences up you make your email easier to skim and thus easier for a mobile reader to digest.

Test it out yourself. Send a few emails you would usually send or are about to send to yourself instead of the outside world. Try and read that email from your mobile while putting yourself in your reader’s mind (they might be waiting for a bus that is just about to pull up). Would you be able to quickly understand the emails contents?

Android users will surpass iPhone users in 2010

Android appears to be getting the traction it has been looking for probably thanks to all of those new Android handsets being announced.

Android users will surpass iPhone users by the end of 2010, according to statistics collected by Google’s Admob ad network, said Admob Team Manager Brendon Kraham. This is despite the fact that the data usage and number of apps on iPhone (and iPod Touch) far exceed those on Android.

You can read more over at MobileBeat.

Mobile Browsing Prime Time Is 8pm To Midnight

Opera’s state of the mobile web report has been released for May 2010.

One of the findings that struck me the most is:

It turns out that the prime time for mobile browsing in every country was at night, from 8 p.m. to midnight. This holds true for all the countries in the top 10, with the real variation coming at other times of the day.

My guess at why this is the case would be entirely based on what I do. I sit down at night and flick through my Google Reader feeds or other sites. I don’t really get the chance to do this during the day. Whilst I don’t think the majority of the mobile internet population is flicking through Google Reader, I imagine they still just want to flick through the internet and at night is when they get the time to.

Most developers only make $700 from their iPhone Apps

I just read a great post explaining why most developers only make $700 from their iPhone Apps:

• Apple claims that cumulative app revenue has reached $1,4bn by June 2010. This is based on 5bn downloads (free and paid)
• Several reports have pinned the number of paid apps to be about 73-77% of the total. At the moment, there are 225.000 apps in total, which at 73% gives 164.250 paid apps.
• The average revenue is roughly then 1.4bn/164.000 less Apple’s 30% cut, which means developers earned on average $6.100/app over a 2 year period, or $3.050 per year/app.
• However, average is not a relevant measure, because it is skewed as the tail of apps is long. There are a few apps who make the majority of money, so the relevant number is the median, where 50% make more, and 50% make less
• The average price for an app, based on a number of reports, is roughtly about $1.95/app, which puts the number of paid apps downloads to about 733 million, or 15% of the total number of downloads.
• SuperCollider Blog reported that half of all paid apps have less than 1000 downloads, say 999. At $1.95, that means the median revenue over two years is $1363, or $682 for one year, i.e. app $ 700 (see SuperColliders post on the economics of branded apps for more).

It is taken from a comprehensive analysis of iPhone App economics.

You really need to decide on what your goals are. Free apps are generally downloaded more than paid apps and thus have a greater reach. Advertising on your free apps can be a better option than charging for your app in terms of revenue generated. That said, charging for an app has seen some great successes.

Checkout one of my old posts: Brand Marketers: Don’t Sell Your iPhone App! If you’ve found this of interest.