If you are like us, you may very well constitute one of many in the quickly growing pool of U.S. smartphone users. comScore's "2010 Mobile Year in Review" this month said U.S. smartphone adoption in December 2010 reached 27 percent of mobile subscribers. And these phones accompany us wherever we go whether for work or play and often times for both.

We saw something else online that jumped out that seemed to map to the comScore figure - Strategy Analytics has forecast that in 2011, smartphones that utilize mobile enterprise applications will become an integral part of everyday IT operations. And this development, they say, will change standard business operations. Truth be told, the way we have been using our mobile phones, we felt this prediction began to come true some time ago. How are you using your mobile phones?

So what does all of this add up to for email marketers? Do marketing applications for platforms like the iPhone make life (read: work) easier? Do they offer the same functionality that marketing professionals are accustomed to (or at least the most important aspects) on their desktop? Those are some of the basic questions we set out with as we engineered our new iPhone application for email marketing.

We asked customers what they were looking for in a mobile email marketing application in order to advance the utility of these apps, and a couple of common aspects arose. One was the desire for a more comprehensive view of email campaigns – a mobile campaign dashboard with real-time campaign insights into not just opens and bounces but also conversions and revenues – often times truer indicators of ROI. What are you looking for in a mobile email marketing application?

A second aspect, as important as the first, was the capability to control email campaigns in motion. This means finally offering a full-featured application to do more than see campaign results but control them too. This pinpoint mobile control means being able to schedule email campaigns, stop them, and reschedule them, all features that we built into our mobile application. Also, the chance to preview messages before sending to see how they look and render on mobile devices was important. And to complement that, we included the ability to preview and sanitize email lists too.

For those who can use our mobile application please do – it is in the iTunes App Store, so download it and let us know how it helps and how we can continue to improve it. We want to ensure that mobile applications live up to their promise – enabling better campaigns and facilitated productivity so there is at least as much time for play as there is for work when we head out with our mobile devices. Let us know about your experiences!

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About the Author

Tina Stewart (@SocialTIS) is Senior VP Of Marketing at Lyris, responsible for all aspects of Lyris' global corporate marketing organization. With more than 20 years of experience, Stewart served as senior director of Web and online strategy for Juniper Networks, vice president of worldwide marketing for Arbor Networks, and held senior marketing roles at several other technology companies.

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