This afternoon while reading up on email marketing to mobile devices, the thought was reinforced in my mind that email marketing to mobile devices will fall short of users and marketers expectations.  The reason for this opinion is driven by two simple points:

Reading email on your smart phone is great for convenience and for items that are urgent.  Most marketing messages are neither.

Now, I'm not debunking the value of mobile marketing. In fact, I take the view that mobile marketing is a hot space but believe other technologies are much better suited to the convenient and the urgent needs of the user.

Text messaging, as an example is well entrenched into reality TV shows.  It is convenient and urgent for those that are deeply engaged in voting on the show.  Text messaging is simple, it's fast and nearly ubiquitous.  It's great way to communicate at events like concerts or those enabled by location specific offers.

Consider too the integration of ad serving platforms, social tools like Facebook and the use of key tokens or phrases that pull offers from a web site to the phone for immediate viewing and interaction by the device owner.

The whole notion of a "mailbox" and mobility simply seem to be at odds.  Oh, I know email can be automatically forwarded to my smart phone and I can respond to it immediately.  It's just that the mailbox is a middleman of sorts.  It contains spam filters, business rules and attachments.  As a marketer, it just seems much easier to go directly to the mobile device - through use of the phone number - or GPS locater - and interact directly with the device owner - instead of working through that darn mailbox.

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