Military.com Gets Mobile Wakeup Call

7/26/11

By Ken Magill

You may have more mobile users than you think. That’s what the folks at Military.com recently found out.

They have just been given the message that it’s time to take smart phones seriously and they’re heeding it.

The organization—which aims to serve the informational needs of active-duty military members and veterans—found that 26.3 percent of its 10 million members access their email newsletters through smart phones.

“We didn’t think that we had that many mobile users,” said Kirk Gray, emarketing specialist - member communications, Military.com. “We knew we had mobile users, we just didn’t know how many we had. We’ve doubled our numbers in less than a year’s time.”

Last year, 13 percent of Military.com’s members accessed their messages on smart phones, said Gray.

And it turns out our military members’ smart phone of choice is produced by Apple.

“Basically, we’re dominated by the iPhone,” he said.

Moreover, that 26 percent figure represents a large mobile audience.

Military.com has 26 weekly newsletters covering topics like news, finance, entertainment and benefits and sends an average 27 million email messages a week. The company makes money through ad revenue on its site and in its newsletters.

Of course, the surge in smart phone users at Military.com has resulted in a higher sense of urgency to address mobile users’ needs.

“We’ve got six good working [mobile] templates. We’ve got best practices from those templates. Now it’s time to move them to the other 20,” he said. “That’s now on the front burner.”

Gray added that Military.com’s growing iPhone user base presents an opportunity to tout it to advertisers.

“We’ve got banking clients that have iPhone apps where people can deposit checks with their iPhones,” he said. “We’re going to start tagging our mobile users and then we can go to our clients and say ‘we’ve got 10 million members and we’ve got 3 million members who can potentially use your iPhone app to deposit a check.’ So now we’ve got a way to add a new revenue stream to what we call client solos.”

Military.com got the information on its mobile user base by using a service available from email security and deliverability firm Return Path called Campaign Insight.

“Campaign Insight was designed with the idea of bringing marketers closer to their audience,” said George Bilbrey, President of Return Path, in a statement.  “For Military.com, the mobile platform has become increasingly important.”

It’s a safe bet that many marketers would be surprised at the recent growth of their mobile user base.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 35 percent of U.S. adults own a smart phone and a quarter of smart phone owners say their phone is where they do most of their browsing.

According to Return Path, an average of 19.5 percent of its clients' subscribers access their messages on mobile devices.

Update: Here are some mobile stats supplied by Jordie van Rijn, publisher of emailmonday. Thanks, Jordie!

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