If Your Mobile Strategy Can Win Here, It Can Win Anywhere

As a marketer, I work to engage women online with brands and causes. Ultimately, however, we hope for more than merely sales or action: we want to build a relationship with our audience. Ideally, a brand and a woman of influence interact directly, one to one. But there's something that's increasingly coloring our relationship. It's her phone. The phone is more than our hardware. It's our lifeline.

A stunning 64.7% of emails to my all-female marketing database are opened on iPhones, likely because many on my mailing list are busy moms who often aren't in front of a computer. Whitney Broadwell of Women for Women International notices the same trend: "This time last year, 12% of our email opens were through mobile, now it's 33% and climbing every month."

If you're marketing to women through social media, imagine your conversations mediated by a smartphone screen. According to a 2013 survey by Nielsen, "Nearly 60% of women use Facebook/access Facebook multiple times a day on their device/computer compared to approximately 45% of men." Women, already social media power users, are increasingly exercising that influence via their phones.