Last week, my colleague Valerie Jones-Harvey posted an article about how different mobile devices – particularly the iPhone and BlackBerry - affect email rendering. One of her points was that HTML emails that are viewed on BlackBerry’s and other non-iPhone devices tend to get garbled and are difficult to act upon.

Recognizing difference in email rendering is obviously important to understand in order to strategically create text based email messages or even SMS alerts. But it is also important to realize that the intent of a user is likely different depending on the type of device they are using. Many mobile devices are great for text based email, but rarely does an interaction extend beyond the email – no forms are filled out, no links are clicked. And there lies the real beauty of the iPhone – your entire marketing ‘funnel’ is open for business. Your customer reads an email, can click on a link to your targeted landing page, and can respond to your messaging within your Web site.

As other’s have described, the iPhone changes the game because it’s more realistic for users to interact with ‘the Web’ as it was intended. There really aren’t a lot of hurdles so it’s actually possible that when someone opens an email on an iPhone not only can they read the email as it was meant to be displayed but they are also able to interact with the message of the email – they are in an interactive, Web browsing world.

Luckily, the iPhone doesn’t have a monopoly on this enhanced user experience - or at least not for long. Several new devices from existing mobile manufacturers (LG, Samsung) are on the market and the announcement of the Google’s Android platform means that rich applications – and the devices to support them – are on the way.

It seems like every year for the last several years has been the ‘year of the mobile revolution’. Now, since the mobile Web is shaping up to be just the plain, old, regular Web, I might believe it.

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