By end of 2012 more email will be read on mobile than desktop

Return Path's survey, "Email in Motion: Mobile is Leading the Email Revolution", reveals that mobile email views are up significantly year on year. From March 2011 through March 2012, mobile email views rose 82.4% with 88% of people checking email on their mobile device on a daily basis.

Eighty-five percent of mobile email opens were done on an Apple-branded device. The iPad saw a 54% annual growth in mobile email use.

So, that's the good news. The bad news for those businesses that have not yet optimized email for mobile is that almost two-thirds of Americans and 41% of Europeans will simply close or delete an email that doesn't render well on their mobile device. That's a lot of lost customers.

And, businesses better be quick to act. Return Path forecasts that, by the end of this year, more emails will be read on a mobile device than on webmail or desktop.

"The future of computing is mobile. Our data clearly shows the trend for email consumption: more and more people are using smartphones and tablets and moving away from PCs and desktop," said Matt Blumberg, CEO at Return Path.

"Despite this, a recent study by Econsultancy found that nearly half of marketers don't know how many mobile subscribers they have. Marketers that don't have the basic data they need to figure out their mobile strategy will likely lose out."

Tags: Apple, email, email trends, mobile, mobile strategy, mobile subscribers, mobile trends, smartphone, tablet