Even though Apple has refused to support Flash on their iphones and ipads, the opportunities are still endless. Sky have recently launched their ipad app, meaning users can watch Sky Sports live.

Below is just an outline of what an ipad could mean for your business and how it will change the face of email marketing forever.

Although the ipad is meant for personal rather than business use, it still has its relevance in today’s corporate world.  The benefit of sending emails to customers who have ipads (not that you would be able to get hold of this information) is that they are more likely to read the email. When at work consumers are busy working and replying to the more important emails, meaning your email often gets overlooked or seen as spam. However, this changes when the email is read on a device like an ipad as consumers often spend time browsing through their emails at a leisurely pace. 

The next issue is visibility. The preview pane in Outlook is small and people can only see the top of the email, which contains a header with the company logo and no real information, which doesn’t  convey your message well. Some webmail clients, such as Google Mail, Yahoo etc also disable images within emails. This helps to destroy your brand image and appears unprofessional. The best ones to test to ensure that the majority of your audience don’t experience any issues or irregularities in rendering are Yahoo!, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail/Google Mail and AOL. Test these periodically to ensure that email client changes and upgrades don’t affect your emails.Contrast all of this to the iPad. Images are displayed by default. The preview pane is much larger. This means that recipients be able to preview most of your email. There are also fewer distractions on the email client itself; Outlook has tons of sidebars, folders and options that not only take up valuable space but compete for attention with emails.

Another advantage from a technical point of view is that the iPad email client uses the same rendering engine as the Safari web browser. This means that if something displays fine in Safari, it will appear almost exactly the same in an iPad email. And Safari will display things almost exactly the same as Firefox, Chrome and, if you’re careful, the later versions of Internet Explorer. Since Safari supports HTML 5, so does the iPad email client. One of the main features of HTML 5 is the ability to embed images directly in the page. If the iPad takes off this could lead to a boom in video email marketing.

I would encourage all email marketers to get hold of an iPad and start testing. You need to see how your emails look on this new device and make sure that they are rendering correctly. This is just the beginning of how email marketing will change over the next few years so make sure you keep abreast of the latest technological advances and social revolutions.