Die mobile Evolution der E-Mail

It's conference season, which means that I'm on the road nearly every week for the next month or so. I recently got back from Acxiom's Engage conference where I spoke about mobile marketing. Mobile was also a big topic of discussion at ExactTarget's Connections conference, which my friend Simms Jenkins captured well in his latest column. In the coming weeks, I'll be heading to the annual DMA show in Boston, where there is an entire track dedicated to mobile.

The blending of mobile, email, and direct marketing has been building for the last decade, but as marketers, we have to recognize mobile as the mainstream channel it has become. As an email marketer, we also need to be aware of the mobile platform's impact on email marketing. Here is a brief rundown of some statistics that highlight the state of mobile.

Morgan Stanley reports that there were more smartphones shipped in 2011 than laptops and that smartphones now outpace the growth of simple featurephones this year, a disparity that will nearly double in 2012. The company estimates that there will be 119 million smartphones shipped in 2012 compared to 67 million featurephones. What is more staggering is that smartphones have outpaced PC shipments.