Mobile devices are either beside or in the pockets of most people every minute of the day. It’s the thing we never leave home without.

Interestingly enough, email and mobile devices never used to go together. Who would ever want to check their email from a cell phone – it just didn’t make sense, even a few years ago.

Fast forward to 2012 and the times have changed dramatically.

According to Litmus, accessing email on mobile devices is becoming quite the norm.  Only 18 months ago, their data showed that email opens on a mobile device were coming in at 17%. As of September 2012, that number has ballooned up to 38% of all opens!

This is taking into account over 1 billion opens by their customers.

What this Means for Your Emails

This is huge for your emails, in a number of ways…

First, it’s huge for the formatting. Judging from that high percentage, chances are, you’ve checked your email a time or two on your cell phone. Do you know how your own emails look on a mobile phone?

Because that small screen doesn’t hide misspellings or space out big blocks of text for you.

The surest way to be certain -

Send yourself a message from your autoresponder account.

Something that looked great while composing your email message may become really ugly when opened on a mobile device. Remember, details become very noticeable.

Second, this is huge for email length. Many of the top copywriters that I study have always taught that email length is for the most part, irrelevant, AS LONG AS the message was compelling enough to balance out the length. And of course, generate a click.

With this rise in mobile email, this may not be the case any longer.

Try opening and reading a long email on a cell phone – once you adjust the screen, then you have to scroll forever just to read every part of the message. So, long, windy emails may be on their way out.

And third, this is huge from a sales perspective. When consumers check their email on mobile devices, you assume that it’s an on-the-go type thing. They are either in route in a car or walking somewhere or waiting for someone or something.

This may be an opportune time for them to open your email, click your sales link and make a purchase.

Provided the process goes as smooth as that.

There are many kinks that can creep up between the time they click on your link and they make a purchase.

How to Streamline the Mobile Email Process

The fact is that more and more people are checking their emails from mobile devices. Unfortunately, this probably also translates into more multi-tasking and more distractions and thus, less click-throughs.

And even when they do click-through, then the sales process kicks in and it may not be the least bit mobile friendly.

At this stage, I would not suggest altering your entire sales process to fit mobile devices… yet.

Just because the number of email opens on mobile devices is increasing, the majority of your actual click-throughs and subsequent sales will come from a consumer actually being on a computer.

What may become more commonplace is a more condensed email message and sales page – ones with short paragraphs, easy to read bullets, more to-the-point sales copy and maybe even more videos. In other words, things that would be mobile device friendly.

But for right now, testing out your own email messages on a mobile device and then tweaking them from there would be the best move.

Ultimately, you can’t control in what capacity readers are viewing your emails, mobile or on a computer, they could be multitasking, killing time or waiting for an email from the boss.

The only thing you can control is the riveting copy that makes a reader stop everything else they are doing, put dinner on hold, let the kids watch another 5 minutes… just so they can finish reading (and clicking the link in) your irresistible email message.

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