ExactTarget, an email marketing specialist, conducted research in June 2011 that revealed email is the most powerful form of mobile marketing in terms of driving purchase among smartphone owners in the US.

56% smartphone owners who had made a purchase because of a mobile marketing message said they had done so after receiving a mobile marketing email, even if they didn’t buy via their phone they attributed the purchase to the mobile message.

Email is the single most common mobile web usage and according to Nielsen it accounts for 38.5% of mobile internet time and our own survey found 85% respondents collecting, reading or responding to emails on their mobiles.  Mobile email will account for 10 to 35% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product and email type according to emailMonday.

Mobile mail is clearly powerful and with these sorts of response rates it is imperative that on the other side of the click is a landing page or web site optimised for mobile.  A smooth cross-channel transition ensures consumers stay engaged and connected, increasing the opportunity for further interaction.   When sending out email communications; be mobile friendly before and after the click.

Yes, you can deliver the entire reshuffled, resized web site to mobile devices and it is indeed this adaptive developmental approach that enables our own platform to produce and reproduce content to all mobile devices. Our developers are web developers first but with years of mobile experience layered on the top.  It is this experience that has taught us something very valuable; To be responsive and adaptive is part of life, part of developing, part of the reason our mobile platform is so successful, but it is important to recognise the stop point. The needs, size and location of a 21 inch shared desktop user are vastly different to the needs, size, mobility and personal elements of a mobile consumer. Mobile Web is quite simply not the same channel as web and shoehorning a desktop site into a mobile screen is not optimal at all.

Mobile is its own channel with its own needs, users, devices, design and usability issues and it is the failure to recognise this starting point that means responsive web fails for mobile.

Five errors of responsive design for mobile

Same Users, Same Web.  To presume the same activity is being carried out in the same manner across web and mobile is where the first error of responsive web design occurs. We use the web differently based on time, location and device to hand and these differences affect our motivation and needs from the web, which content we require and how we interact with a website.  Dumping an entire desktop site into a mobile screen undermines the power of mobile.

Designing for Devices not Users. Adapting content based entirely on screen size not for the users needs is another responsive fail.  Using the screen size to present content is useful to a point but overlooks usability issues such as the absence of hover state on mobile, the difference in size of a mouse pointer and a thumb for click-able areas, the need to “tap” as opposed to “click” and how each of these issues impacts mobile design.

Confusing Content and Context. The analogy that content is “liquid” and can be poured into any size container is attractive, yet this requires all content to be equal, regardless of context, and from this blanket approach arise a further slew of usability issues for mobile users.  An example being, when on a desktop site location is not high priority.  When on mobile searching for the same business is higher priority.

All for one and one for all. The fourth fail is to push all desktop content through to the mobile user. Stuffing huge amounts of content and assets through a small channel leaves the end user frustrated waiting for a site to load.  Altering the aspect ratio of an image does not alter the size, so a 2mb image is still being given to the mobile user.  This is detrimental for the mobile user and the brand presenting a mobile website as we know users will wait between 3 and 10 seconds for a site to load before moving elsewhere.

A mobile needle in a haystack.  A less investigated issue is the impact responsive web has on Search Engine Optimisation.   I’ve already raised that mobile web users are not looking for the same content as desktop users therefore it is likely their search terms will reflect this differing need.  This could explain why most of the higher ranking mobile sites in mobile search are designed specifically for mobile as they’ve taken in to account the mobile consumers mind set, needs and unique mobile-only prerequisites such as localisation.

Recognising the strengths and unique capabilities of each channel ensures you design, develop and deliver the optimum experience to end-users.  When creating a movie from a book you don’t hand each of the actors the book and ask them to read aloud from it.   You take what is beautiful and unique about TV and adapt the storytelling to these strengths.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom recently summarised it as “You can’t take a desktop experience and shove it into a 3-by-4-in screen. It’s a very different behavior pattern…People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs and…when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product…”

Responsive web design most certainly has it’s place and will continue to evolve to deliver greater web experiences especially across desktop devices but assuming screen size is the only differentiator between mobile, tablet and pc as a basic fundamental is incorrect and not a strong foundation to develop and build a lasting mobile strategy from.

If you want a great website find a great web agency, but if you want a mobile website find a great mobile web agency.

We have built thousands of sites that implement this technique, and we know users of our platform find it an extremely useful tool to have in their arsenal. However, there are some considerations that need to be taken into account to create an effective advertising campaign:

1. Context is important Think about whether it makes sense to include this functionality. Does it add value to the user’s visit? We have seen the most impressive results when a click to call button complements the content. An example of this can be seen at a site we built for Windstar Cruises: the user is invited to call an operator to book a holiday, but crucially they have just been consuming the information that is relevant to this process. Windstar saw a good return on this, with the rate of visitors to calls being around 10%. Bad examples we have seen have included plain pages with a large button: these are unsuccessful because they are not compelling, nor do they look professional enough to convince a visitor to put aside the time to call.

2. Engage your audience While ad-platforms contain the capability to have banners launch a call, a 300x50px banner with a 50-word limit isn’t the place to make a convincing argument for getting in touch and with a lack of engagement the conversion rates will be low. Use your creative to deliver a landing page to the visitor: you can supplement the original message with further details, features and interaction. A call is still just a click away, but you’ve used the opportunity to engage fully with your visitor and the likelihood of them calling you is now far greater.

3. Be clear Tell your visitor who they will be calling, and give them a good reason to. Let them know how long the process will take. By default, Wapple Canvas will display the phone number to be used, but this can be overridden with a custom label – your call-to-action. Adding useful information such as telephone rates and opening hours reduces the barrier to conversion. With the activation and suppression rules in Canvas, it is possible to set the click-to-call to only display during office hours – offer a form to capture data from out-of-hours users.

4. Be aware of where traffic is coming from A visitor who has arrived directly at your site may be more likely to contact you than one who has followed a banner advertisement because they are more invested. You can use campaigns within Canvas to offer different experiences to those arriving from differing sources. By using our device detection technology on your main website and taking advantage of Wapple’s API, you can deliver a mobile site to visitors to your canonical URL. And by doing this you can make sure you are delivering content and features that mobile can take advantage of.

5. Have a plan Don’t tack a click-to-call on without knowing how you will track the numbers calling through. While it is possible to record the number of clicks the button receives, users can still cancel the call on the phone prompt. The phonecall chunk in Canvas offers the option to auto-dial the desired number: by combining this with a ‘fake’ click to call button that redirects to a ‘Thank you for calling’ page, with said auto-dialler on, you are able to get an impression of the number of conversions. However, the most concrete method of recording the number of calls is to use a number specific to the campaign.

Click-to-call buttons on your mobile sites enables you to utilise the main reason people carry a phone; to easily talk to a real person.

Google reported that mobile web is now growing 8X faster than the internet (mobile marketer)

A recent survey by ZMags suggests that 87% of respondants prefer using the mobile web over apps. Furthermore other research shows if a brand site doesnt load on mobile in less than 10 seconds, just 3 seconds for an e-commerce site, 50% of visitors will go away, and 3 out of 5 will never come back.

We know from working with thousands of brands that a web site will typically receive an 84% bounce-rate from mobiles. This is almost instantly converted into a healthy 20% of traffic coming from mobile devices following the creation of a mobile optimised web site.

Consumers love mobile web, but hate it when their favourite brands don’t reciprocate, and there is much unrequited love out there. However, rather than hanging around, mobile web lovers will quickly turn their affections to an already mobilised competitor.

A shocking 83% of UK businesses do not have a mobile optimised website (download MMA research PDF), juxtaposed against nearly 40% of UK adults owning, and using for a wide range of online activities, a smartphone. In the same study 48% of respondents recognised the need to optimise their websites for mobile and cite an absence of one as a barrier to further mobile marketing activities.

The tide is starting to turn with initiatives like Google’s GetMo that provide UK businesses with the critical tools and resources to support their mobile marketing activity and aid them in establishing their mobile-friendly website.

Our involvement with GetMo is key as we provide opportunities for businesses to quickly mobilise whilst maintaining quality of brand and user experience. It’s time to address the needs of UK mobile consumers and get mobile.

We have an internal system for displaying mobile sites that have been built by our developers and customers using Canvas and Architect. Because there are literally thousands and thousands of these sites we have developed a cool mechanism to highlight those that have been completed and published.

For 8 years we have been living and breathing mobile web here at Wapple and our greatest passion is to empower our designer and developer base to become successful using the Wapple mobile build and publishing platform; the same platform we use internally to develop some of biggest brand sites in the world.

And this is why I was SO overjoyed when a huge percentage of the sites that were showing on our internal display were utterly world-class. Sites that we at Wapple would be proud of if we had produced them ourselves.

The Wapple platform I am talking about is not a template site builder or a screen-scraping solution so the thousands of sites that are appearing on our display really ARE the best in class (we have a separate product to cater for SMEs that requires less skill but still produces best results) and we can proudly say that people who take the time to learn to use Canvas and Architect and who use our community, tutorials and best-practice guides REALLY ARE the best Mobile Web Developers and Designers in the world today.

Soon we will showcase these designers and developers on our website and through our social channels and the guys that receive the greatest ratings will be invited to become part of our pending accredited program. Watch this space!

If you are a Wapple platform developer and would like us to review your own sites please submit your URLS for review inside the Community or email to community@wapple.net

In the meantime, here are some awesome examples from the likes of Flood Light Studios, Maciv Ltd, Creel Printing Ltd, Syntagm and Keys Innovation Solutions amongst others. LIKE and Comment on these great designs on Facebook

Our tech-savvy participants reported carrying out a wide range of activities on mobile web from shopping, banking and watching videos but predominantly to access emails, socialise or for information, maps and directions.

We asked what would improve the experince of the mobile web and almost all cited the need for mobile-friendly sites or raised issues of usabilty, design, speed and accessibility; which would predominantly be addressed if brands presented mobile optimised sites. ‘Other’ included ideas for offline mode, cloud storage and improved security.

We saw earlier that 85% accessed the mobile web via Smart phones showing people are accessing the web via mobile devices but, as their experience shows, the mobile sites are not delivering the quality of user experience the phones and technology could and that consumers are asking for.

For business to serve consumers better, efforts must be put into delivering quality usable interactive mobile optimised sites that are easily accessible by all regardless of device. We continue to see the percentages of online traffic via mobile increase, but it is increasing more slowly than it could, not because consumers aren’t using it but because businesses haven’t yet tailored a high-quality mobile-friendly experience for them.

This week Forrester Research published that mobile is the “new face of engagement that is here to stay and just as the internet made us take a long hard look at how we structured IT, so too does Mobile.  Smartphone ownership is already nearing 1 billion, meaning your customers will be looking for you via their mobiles, are you ready?

The Gomometer is a great starting point where you can easily test whether you are mobile ready. Simply enter your website URL and it’ll check the configuration and loading speeds to determine whether your consumers are having a great or poor time. Although we were 100% confident our site was mobile-friendly we ran it through the Gomometer to see the results! As expected our site loads quickly in 0.97 seconds and we passed all the mobile-friendly tests!

As we’ve talked about before, a mobile friendly site is designed for smaller screen but without compromising quality or experience. Content needs to be visible, readable and usable. A mobile site should interact with a consumer for their unique device and provide mobile-specific opportunities such as location-based offerings. Interaction must be simple, easy with few thumb size clicks and contact numbers should display as click-to-call.

See how friendly your site is and find out how to Go Mobile

68% responded that a tablet would be the device they would most like to own next and given that in yesterdays results the tablet is seen by 70% to be a mobile device this opens up numerous opportunities, as well as barriers, for brands presenting content to multiple platforms across the web. The numbers of respondents wishing for a Tablet as opposed to other devices may simply represent that smartphone penetration and pc ownership are still far greater than the Tablet. “Other” in the below chart includes Smart Tv and future inventions!

When asked which Smartphone respondents most wanted to own next, the iPhone took a staggering 50% of votes. The other half of responses were spread fairly evenly between Android and Windows platforms with 13% still undecided and Blackberry scaping a tiny 2%. Given other reports of huge Android growth we’d expected to see it cutting into the iPhone share but as these numbers reflect peoples wishes not actual commitment to purchase, and a common comment regarding smartphone choice was that it would ultimately be one they could afford it could be where iPhone physically lose out. This is good news however for Windows with people clearly recognising the potential of WP7.

As highlighted yesterday this survey was distributed across a tech-savvy group so not entirely representative of the mass populous! Tomi Ahonen released figures today on World SmartPhone Final Numbers 2011 showing actual sales from last year giving Apple a market share of just short of 20%.

Tomorrow we’ll look at what you use it for and how to improve the Mobile Web …

91% of respondents reported accessing the web via some sort of mobile phone, 85%  via smartphones and 7% from feature phones, almost all respondents are using a phone to access the mobile web for a variety of activities. Tablet usage to access the web came in much lower however this may be down to penetration, almost everyone has some sort of mobile but not everyone has a tablet. In the below chart “other” consists of smart TVs and games consoles.

We also looked at what devices respondents considered as mobile. The term originally comes as an abbreviation of mobile phone but with an increasing array of devices of varying sizes and abilities, where does mobile begin and end? Almost 70% consider a tablet as a mobile device with netbooks still being viewed by a similar amount as being nearer to a desktop than a mobile.

Next results: what devices and smartphones are on everyones wishlists…