In our blog post last week about best practice in e-mail marketing, we cited research by e-mail testing software house Litmus in 2012 that showed that e-mail opens on mobile devices comprised 43% of all e-mail opens.
This got us thinking about how that percentage typically breaks down between the different mobile platforms - notably, the relative positions of Apple's iOS against its main rival, Google's Android.
iOS is used by all current Apple mobile devices - iPhones, iPads and touch screen iPods.
Android is used by a growing number of phone handset and tablet manufacturers, including Samsung, Sony, HTC and Motorola. You can find a fuller list here.
Data mining
We looked at the data from five e-mail marketing campaigns delivered since 1 May 2013 for clients across the UK, including two clients in Jersey. All are businesses with consumer markets, rather than business-to-business. The three UK-based clients have recipients mostly located in the UK; the two Jersey-based clients have recipients almost exclusively in Jersey.
We wanted to discover any high level trends relating to how the recipients of our clients e-mails viewed them. The strong Jersey focus of the two Jersey clients' lists promised some interesting insights into differences between the habits of Jersey-based and UK-based recipients.
The main finding was that Apple iOS users accounted for almost half of all e-mail opens by recipients on the Jersey lists, compared with an average of 25% for the lists used by the UK clients.
We also found that mobile e-mail usage generally appeared to be substantially higher amongst Jersey recipients than those on the UK lists. Mobile users across all platforms accounted for just over 50% of all e-mail opens by recipients on the Jersey lists, compared with 27% for the lists used by the UK clients.
Conversely, e-mail opens on desktop e-mail software (so that's Outlook and Apple Mail) added to opens via webmail services (like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, which are typically used on larger screens) were are 40% for the Jersey lists, versus 60% for the UK ones.
The conclusions? Jersey e-mail users are a noticeably more mobile lot than the average UK consumer, and their choice of mobile e-mail reading device is overwhelmingly Apple.
More evidence, if you needed it, that you need to make sure that your e-mail marketing in the Channel Islands is mobile-optimised.