LinkedIn, a popular professional social media service with 277 million users, announced in March that it would expand its popular InMail service to cover the burgeoning mobile market. InMail, first introduced in 2009, was originally a desktop only product that allowed marketers to send customized e-mails to LinkedIn users. It’s been a highly successful product for the social media platform. It gave the platform’s professional clients a way to cash in on extremely effective e-mail marketing campaigns. At last glance, e-mail marketing is said to return $40 for every $1 spent. That’s not terribly surprising when you realize that, according to a study from DMA, 66% of e-mail users say they’ve made at least one purchase following the receipt of a marketing e-mail.
The Move Addresses the Shift to Mobile Platforms
Just as overall mobile usage is set to overtake traditional desktop access to the internet in 2014, so, too, is mobile internet marketing becoming an ever more important marketing method. Of the 91% of people who say they check their e-mail daily, more than 50% say they do so exclusively from their favorite mobile device. By offering its popular InMail product to a community of marketers that are increasingly concerned with the mobile market, LinkedIn ensures it remains an important part of the web marketing world going forward.
The jump for LinkedIn won’t be a big one. 41% of the service’s traffic already comes from the mobile community. By adapting its extremely popular technology to the mobile market, a market that’s expected to spend $113 billion online by 2017, the service is giving its users, not to mention its partners’, what they’ve clearly been wanting for a long time.
How successful do you think the expansion of InMail to the mobile market will be? Let us know in the comments below.