Merkle www.merkle.com, the nation's largest and fastest growing independent customer relationship marketing agency, announced that it is creating and delivering targeted, graphically rich mobile optimized emails and providing advanced mobile campaign insights for its nationwide client base of top brand. The delivery of dynamic and personalized content that displays properly across all mobile Internet-enabled devices and major smart phones, including iPhone, Palm Pre and Driod, with vital post-campaign tracking and analysis, was previously not widely available to marketers.

Traditionally, ensuring the appearance of emails on mobile phones has been a challenge, causing many marketers to resort to sending text-only emails to its opt-in customer base. The newness of the technology means that there is also a lack of standards across mobile phone platforms-creating issues with how each mobile device displays graphically rich email. Further, differences in display sizes among different devices make dynamic content delivery, post-campaign open rates, click-through tracking and other requirements continuous issues.

"The mobile channel has quickly transformed from an interesting marketing option to a fundamental element of today's integrated customer marketing programs," said Tim Judson, Vice President, Email Solutions, Merkle. "In researching this remarkable shift, we found that mobile email users spend approximately 18% of their permission email time on a mobile phone, indicating the importance of sending email that renders correctly across multiple devices. That is why we are excited to be one of the first marketing agencies to give our clients the ability to extend their email programs to all mobile users as well as design innovative new campaign strategies to reach on-the-go mobile customers."

Recent campaign results point to the growing use of mobile as a marketing channel, in that up to 7% of clicks on email marketing messages come from consumers who use "Click to View" links to see the message or offer properly online. And according to Merkle's View From the Mobile Inbox report of email and related digital media, half of U.S. adults online have an Internet-enabled mobile phone. Of this audience, forty-four percent check their primary, personal email acocunt on their mobile at least occasionally, with over half of the mobile email users (58%) checking multiple times per day.