We live in a mobile-first world. We shop, socialize, work, and create on our phones, expecting seamless, intuitive, and frictionless experiences. As email marketers, we often rely on educated guesses and hard-to-win feedback to improve campaigns. But mobile analytics can revolutionize this process.
Mobile analytics unlock valuable real-time insights into user behavior, preferences, and engagement, accelerating how fast we can make improvements to our email marketing campaigns.
Let’s discuss the role of mobile analytics in UX and how you can use it to boost satisfaction, sales, and loyalty.
What is mobile analytics?
Mobile analytics is gathering and analyzing user data and behaviors specifically on mobile websites, apps, and devices. This insight comprises of qualitative and quantitative data, such as:
- How long readers interact with your email or landing pages
- Which elements (like CTA buttons) get the most clicks or which don't get interacted with at all
- The navigational path that users take through your email.
- The path users take after clicking an email link.
- Points of friction such as poorly optimized layouts or broken links.
- Performance issues like slow-loading images or inaccessible designs.
Key differences between mobile analytics and traditional analytics
While traditional analytics might measure desktop-based metrics, mobile analytics reveals how factors like responsive design, mobile-friendly layouts, and load times impact engagement.
From interactions like swipes, clicks, to even orientation changes (landscape vs. portrait). For email marketers, this means deeper insights into how users engage with your content on mobile.
Key email metrics in mobile analytics
These are commonly measured because each gives you important information about user engagement and your email's performance. Collectively, they give you an overarching view of what’s working well and what isn’t so you can improve your campaigns.
- Open rate: Helps you assess whether your email captures interest at first glance. Low open rates on mobile may signal that your subject lines or send time isn’t aligned with user preferences. For mobile users, shorter, punchier subject lines often perform better, as they’re fully visible on smaller screens.
- Device-specific click rates: Analyzing clicks segmented by device type (e.g., smartphones vs. tablets) can help you understand how different mobile experiences affect engagement. . For example, smartphone users may prefer more streamlined layouts, while tablet users may enjoy more detailed content.
- Scroll depth: Tracks how far users scroll through your email on mobile devices. If users don't scroll past the top of your email on mobile, this may guide you to add the most important content above the fold.
- Bounce rate: Measures how often users exit or leave your linked pages immediately after clicking through from an email. On mobile, high bounce rates might stem from slow-loading pages, confusing navigation, or unresponsive design.
- Conversion rate: This is the percentage of users who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or clicking on a landing page. It offers insight into how effectively your emails are in achieing the intended goals whether it is a traditional campaign or experiential.
Whatever metrics you prioritize, make sure to integrate a robust, accurate data processing pipeline. This guarantees real-time insights, so you’re always making decisions based on the latest figures.
How mobile analytics can help you improve user experience
1. Identify gaps and friction early on
Delivering a smooth user experience is crucial for high engagement. If users encounter barriers that prevent them from taking action, it's best to know the root cause sooner rather than later.
Mobile analytics uncover navigational and performance issues like confusing layouts, unresponsive buttons, or poor readability.
For example, if a significant portion of users drop off after opening your email, analytics might reveal slow-loading images or unclear CTAs as culprits. You can also pair your website's mobile analytics to inform your email campaigns.
For example, let’s say that a high volume of users is churning during your in-app checkout process, which according to the Baymard Institute study might happen for varying reasons.
On your website you may integrate a solution like Vonage Cloud PBX to enable users to contact your customer support team directly from the checkout page. Or proactively offer support via live chat (just make sure to follow TCPA compliance). But then you can go one step further and set up abandoned cart campaigns to re-engage users.
In short, mobile analytics can provide helpful insight into your users' actual experience, allowing you to explore new and creative solutions. You can use tools like a Kanban board to plan your approach, create visualizations of the user journey, pinpoint priority areas for improvement, and assign tasks to relevant teams.
2. Analyze user flows
Mobile analytics shares valuable insight on your user journey-- from opening and to become a customer. For example, if users abandon your landing page after clicking an email, it could signal that the page design or content isn’t aligned with their expectations. This could mean your page needs to be simplified or your emails need to be a lot more clear.
Again, you can pair your website's or apps mobile analytics to then guide your email campaigns. A recent survey by Newstore found that 60% of shoppers prefer mobile apps over mobile websites. Mobile apps are easier to use, leading to better UX, increased sales, and higher retention.
If you're noticing that users are not as active on mobile app, this could mean your app interface needs to be simplified or that folks may need more guidance. You could send a series of onboarding emails to help customers use your product effectively.
Along with understanding where the friction lies, mobile analytics tells you what motivates consistent engagement. Analytics opens and conversion rates on mobile vs. desktop can uncover the drivers behind engagement and retention for mobile users. It might be that certain types of notification emails encourage repeat interactions.
Overall, understanding what drives loyalty can help you optimize user journeys at scale to drive repeat engagement and long-term retention, making sure you get a good return on your email marketing efforts and app development cost.
3. Create personalize experiences
Mobile analytics offers a deeper understanding of user behavior and preferences. This can be used to segment users and create personalized experiences. You can feed mobile analytics into your CDP and CRM to help you accurately segment customers according to their preferences, user behavior, demographics, and stage in the customer journey. One way to personalize the experience is to tailor the timing of email notifications to when they are most active or recommending solutions to users based on their preferences.
From there, you can then A/B test multiple versions of a personalized email to asses what actually turns leads into customers. For example, you might test two different layouts or calls-to-action.
Design seamless mobile experiences with Beefree
Whether you're crafting emails for E-commerce, SaaS, or B2b, creating convenient, seamless experiences for mobile users is crucial. Mobile analytics keeps your business attuned to the unique needs of your mobile customers. From streamlining journeys to personalizing experiences, the valuable insights gleaned from mobile analytics help you drive sales and retain customers.
Beefree’s Mobile Design Mode eliminates guesswork, allowing you to design with confidence for the fastest-growing segment of email users: those on mobile devices. Our Mobile Design Mode feature allows you to preview and edit emails specifically for mobile devices, ensuring that your design elements—such as images, text, and buttons—adapt perfectly to smaller screens.