Fanminder Blog

The Fact: Somewhere between 16-20% of all emails are opened solely from mobile devices (sources: Return Path, Knotice). Critically, this grew 50% from last year.

This means that unless your email is automatically configured by your service provider to look good and work well on a phone, then you risk 1 in 5 of your customers not seeing and acting on it.

So it looks like in 2011, mobile finally delivered the goods. Nielsen just published their latest stats for 2010 showing:

• 228M mobile phone users 13+ (there’s millions between ages of 8-12 as well)
• 31% of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers have smartphones
• 83M mobile web users – 36% of phone users
• 66% of phone users use SMS
• 38.5% of all time spent on mobile web is for email. 10.7% is for social networking.

What do these numbers mean for the average small business owner? How about these conclusions for 2011:

• There’s about 306M people in the U.S. so 228M phone users is three quarters of the population no including children using phones. That’s alot of users. Mobile phones should be considered an indelible part of the media landscape. Or in english, you should be finding all kinds of ways to communicate to, market to, and service, your customers via phone. Anything less than a concerted push by you to integrate mobile into your 2011 plans is ignoring a historic shift in consumers’ use of technologies.
• SMS is the most ubiquitous form of communication on the phone. We’ve shared this has been the case for a couple of years now. It’s so simple to use, there’s no reason an owner can’t be texting his/her clients throughout the day. If you’re a ___ biz, try __ and__. Or for __ you can try_ and__.
• Mobile web usage is at the point in 2011 where it can’t be ignored any longer. With almost 40% of subscribers using it, savvy owners would be wise to mobilize their websites as a first step. Look at ____, _____, and ______ You’ll also note email is the biggest part of usage so continuing to use your email lists with an eye towards recognizing consumers are reading them on the small screen.
• A whopping 1/3 of mobile users now have smartphones, and that number is only increasing. While it is most definitely too early to devote a lot of effort to marketing to people based on their physical location, it’s not too early to tip toe into the waters with some geo-location marketing experiments in 2011. Especially if you have a lot of young customers, try ____, ____, and _____.

The Wall Street Journal and Nielsen analyzed 60,000 subscribers to find that they are making 25% fewer calls than three years ago.

The article does an efficient, if not wholly effective, job of sharing some of the consequences of too much texting at the expense of live conversations. We all are well aware of the limitations of email in conveying emotion or the nuances of a particular point. As people text more and speak less, this is bound to cause further problems for interpersonal communication.

On the other hands, our world grows faster each day. And at least for marketing purposes who won’t welcome a marketer’s message in 160 characters instead of a long email? Seems like those days are increasingly distant.

I give it to Vista Print, they know their stuff when it comes to small business. Thankfully, they’ve created a small business survey that helps statistically validate what most in our small business marketing industry only use anecdotes to prove: Social media is a critical trend for the smallest of small businesses.

Vista Print polled “micro-business” customers, or those with less than 10 employees. These customers comprise 92% of all their customers.

Relevant Findings

• Social media is the #1 most-used marketing method, and also has just about the least amount of “no interest.”

• Poor Yellow Pages. As a channel, it has the least amount of future interest and the most amount of “no interest.”
• Online Advertising and Direct Marketing have the most future interest, no surprises there.
• These businesses spend an average of 8 hours marketing their business each week!

Interestingly, Vista Print either forgot or left out “Mobile Marketing” as a choice. This is my biggest regret, as good mobile marketing research among small businesses is rare. It’s why we conducted our own small business mobile marketing survey.

I’d like to say these customers are representative of Fanminder’s market of local, small business restaurants and retailers, but they’re not, since two-thirds of these businesses are based from home. In fact, based our what we know from being in-the-trenches, I’d venture to say those numbers might understate interest and use. Nevertheless, Vista Print makes a strong contribution to statistical data on this under-served segment of small businesses.

The Mobile Marketing Association defines mobile marketing as:

“ a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.” ¹

As this definition suggests, there are many ways in which a small business can engage in mobile marketing.  The 1^st Annual Fanminder Small Business Mobile Marketing Survey ² listed six popular mobile marketing programs, asking respondents to rank their interest in them.

As with the mobile marketing benefits, all six mobile marketing programs presented in the survey garnered high interest from respondents—the lowest rated program was still very or extremely interesting to more than 40% of respondents.

Respondents were most interested in a mobile website—a business website optimized for mobile devices.  A recent study by Pew Research Center in Washington showed that 40% of “American adults use their cell phones to surf the Web, e-mail, or use instant messaging,”³ so these business owners are definitely onto something!

Complete results for the 6 programs in the survey are:

What other uses do you think mobile marketing can be used for?

¹ Mobile Marketing Association website.

² 1st annual Fanminder Small Business Mobile Marketing Survey analysis based on 42 responses to an online survey.

³ Smartphone Use on the Web Goes ‘Mainstream’