Adam Baetu
New gadgets like the Apple Watch, the flagship device of the wearable tech trend, can be hugely exciting both for consumers and the tech industry. However, they can also cause headaches for marketers who have to adapt to the new medium, and quickly.
Some marketers dismiss the Apple Watch and devices like it as just a fad, but this could be a mistake. Campaign Monitor has found that Apple’s current iOS devices account for around 41% of email opens and a massive 90% of email opens on mobile devices. Apple clearly leads the way when it comes to how subscribers interact with email, and its innovations in wearable tech could change the nature of email marketing altogether.
If the Apple Watch and other wearable smart devices are to become the future of mobile, brands simply can’t afford to miss out on such a huge chunk of their target audience by not optimising digital and email marketing campaigns to suit wearable tech. But where to start with such a tiny screen and a seemingly limited space in which to make an impact on recipients?
Here are just a few things to bear in mind when preparing email campaigns for wearable devices like the Apple Watch:
- Text-only is back, so subject lines and opening sentences will become even more important. This may be all that a recipient sees of your email, so your subject line will need to make maximum impact. It could even be the entire content of your email, as many are predicting that emails on wearable devices will be short, text-only affairs, so the whole essence of the message will need to be communicated in just a few words.
- Email clients are on your side. While the actual details of how it will work are still a little vague at present, all signs are pointing to email clients such as Gmail (for Android wearable devices) and email marketing service providers preparing solutions for email clients and email marketing on wearable devices.
- Extreme brevity will be needed. You only have a tiny screen with which to make some kind of impact on your recipient, so you’ll need to be right to the point and as dynamic as possible with a careful choice of words.
- Voice engagement. This is very likely to become one of the main ways that users will interact with and respond to emails using wearable tech devices. It could be simple voice commands like ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘reply’, or it could be as complex as dictating responses by voice to be sent by email. This isn’t quite uncharted territory, as voice-commanded personal assistant technology such as Siri on Apple iOS and Cortana on Android is currently in use, but it could present a new challenge for email marketers.
- The handoff. Experts are predicting, thanks to a few hints by Apple, that the idea of the handoff or email triage – where users read a summary of an email on the Watch and respond via an iPhone or other device – will be a common behaviour, which could make metrics and analysis a little trickier for email marketers.
- Bear the above points in mind and you will be well on your way to creating an effective email campaign for Apple Watch and other smart devices.
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