Trends on Tuesday: As Mobile and Desktop Email Open Rates Converge, Responsive Sites Are Crucial

A new report about email usage reinforced the importance of always building responsive websites. Yesmail’s quarterly report showed that mobile and desktop email click-to-open rates are converging to almost the same level for the first time ever.

As people become more mobile-first and mobile-only users of the Internet, users opening emails on their desktop devices has dropped continuously for the past 2 years, from 22.6% to 15.3%.

The report from Yesmail states: “The results certainly support the argument for responsive design,” as those who used responsive design in all of their emails had:

• A greater share of opens occurring on mobile devices, compared with those who never used responsive design (57.2% vs. 51.7%);
• A notable difference in the percentage of clicks occurring on mobile devices (58% vs. 46.7%); and
• A stronger mobile click-to-open rate (16.2% vs. 10.4%).

Making sure your email newsletters, as well as, links from your email newsletters are responsive-optimized is critical for reaching agency audiences who increasingly are using their smartphones for most tasks.