• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 5, 2017

A 25.72% desktop open rate is nothing to sneeze at. But that number, which was generated by email marketers during the Memorial Day weekend, is lower than the 27% average achieved during the Mother’s Day holiday, according to a study by Movable Ink.

Why the dip from holiday to holiday? It’s “likely due to fewer people being at home,” wrote Kristen Dunleavy, content marketing manager at Movable Ink, in a Sunday article on business2.comunity.com.

“More people vacation during Memorial Day weekend than they do during Mother’s Day weekend, so keep this in mind when planning any campaigns around long holiday weekends,” Dunleavy noted.

Probably true. But couldn’t it also be part of a larger shift away from desktop and toward mobile? Smartphone opens hit a whopping 58.85% during the Memorial Day weekend, compared to 58% on Mother’s Day.

Here’s more proof: Smartphone ownership is slated to hit 63% next year, according to a study put out by Zenith. It was 23% in the markets Zenith studied in 2012, and now stands at 56%. And these rates are considerably higher in Europe and Asia – Ireland has a 92% smartphone consumption rate, with Singapore at 91%. Furthermore, mobile will account for 60% of all Internet advertising in 2018, Zenith says.

What does this mean to marketers? Simply that you have to optimize your email for mobile. “With text and buttons that stretch out of the screen and require you to scroll, placeholders for images or links, and a font that’s too big or too small, these emails tend to annoy,” Jasmine Chambers writes in The Realtime Report. “Compare these to well designed emails that present all page components so that they fit on the screen, have images and buttons that behave as they should, and a subject line that gives the reader something useful about the company, and the difference becomes clear.”

Of all the smartphones, the iPhone did best of all in terms of attention in the Movable Ink study, with 15.7.8% of users reading for 15 or more seconds. Desktop was second, with 52.6% claiming that span, compared with 43.7% for Android tabloid owners.

Dunleavy observed that “it’s typical for the iPhone to have high read-lengths."

Get ready, email marketers: There’s still time to build on these findings during Father’s Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day.

Oh, we forgot to add that tablet opens hit a dreary 15.43%.

Meanwhile, the biggest day of all was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, when 60.1% opened commercial emails. This could indicate that they were looking for sales. Or, it could mean that they were scouring their inboxes for hotel receipts, confirmation numbers and other emails containing travel information, Dunleavy speculated. The second-biggest day was Memorial Day itself (remember when it was called Decoration Day? 

In contrast, the biggest desktop open rate — 29.4% — was on Thursday leading into the weekend. This was no surprise because people were “at work and behind their desks,” Dunleavy wrote.

She added that “the end of the holiday weekend saw the most people skimming emails, with nearly 26% reading for just 0-3 seconds on both days.”

Thursday also produced the longest reading time, with 51.2% paying attention for 15 seconds or more. Saturday was a close second, with 50.4% reporting the same time duration.

What does Dunleavy recommend? “It’s more important than ever to include accurate rates and inventory, so consider adding real-time pricing and inventory to your holiday weekend emails to ensure your customers can easily book last-minute deals,” she wrote.

One thing’s for sure: there was plenty to read during last week’s three-day weekend. ”Memorial Day deals are almost as much of a tradition as barbecues on the holiday weekend, and Memorial Day 2017 saw lots of deals — especially in the inbox,” Dunleavy said.