Mobile to become dominant platform for email this year (infographic)

Email readership on mobile devices is on track to surpass both webmail and desktop by the end of 2012, according to new research. The study, from email certification firm Return Path, tracked mobile platforms’ impact on email viewership.

Growth of mobile continues unabated and the trajectory clearly shows that mobile devices will be the predominant platform for email consumption by the end of 2012.
This is a major ground shift from just a few years ago when mobile readership accounted for only 10% of mobile views. As of this study, email readership on mobile accounts for nearly 30% of all opens.
“The future of computing is mobile. Our data clearly shows the trend for email consumption: more and more people are using smartphones and tablets and moving away from PCs and desktop,” said Matt Blumberg, CEO at Return Path. “Despite this, a recent study by Econsultancy* found that nearly half of marketers don’t know how many mobile subscribers they have. Marketers that don’t have the basic data they need to figure out their mobile strategy will likely lose out.”
Key Findings:
• Year-over-year (March ’11 – March ’12) email opens on mobile devices grew 82.4%.
• Apple devices account for 85% of all mobile email opens.
• Email readership on the iPad has increased 53.6% year-over-year.
• Outlook is still the king for desktop email client reads accounting for 68% of all opens. Apple comes in at a distant second with 29%.
• Yahoo Mail! has the most webmail readership at 37%, Hotmail comes in a very close second with 29% and Gmail is in third place at 6%.
Return Path examined data from October 2011 to March 2012 from nearly 500 different clients and examined more than 1 billion data points using its Campaign Insight tool, that tracks which platforms and email programs subscribers use to read email.

View the complete findings here
Source: www.returnpath.net.