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Visions of crowds lined up outside Apple stores panting to get their hands on an iPhone got you fretting over readying your marketing efforts for the mobile future? Rest easy on one score: Mobile or not, you probably won’t need to change your e-mail marketing tactics for a long while.

That’s the primary finding of a new survey published by e-mail marketing consultancy Exact Target, and it relates not only to Apple’s latest and (Jobs willing) greatest device but to the immense gamut of smartphone handsets that U.S. wireless customers can take advantage of.

It makes sense to raise the question of how spreading smartphone and PDA access will affect e-mail marketing plans. Smartphones, full-featured phones that combine voice with computer-like functions including e-mail, are one of the fastest growing segments in mobile, according to a study by analyst firm IDC, with sales growing 46% between Q3 2005 and Q3 2006, about twice the growth rate for mobile generally. Part of that expansion comes from falling prices. Manufacturers such as Motorola and RIM are making the Q and select Blackberry models available for under $100. And if the iPhone scores a hit, other makers can be expected to roll out similar phones for lower price points than Apple’s.

Some of those smartphone users are marketing execs, of course, and e-mail marketing firm Exact Target found that it was getting frantic calls about how a company’s e-mail was displaying on smartphones—and in particular, the Blackberrys used by the higher-ups.

“Running the strategic consulting division of a large [e-mail service provider], we get hammered with these questions al the time,” says Morgan Stewart, one of the principal researchers on the Exact Target report. “At least two to three times a week a client will call up and say, ‘How do we handle this? My boss just saw our e-mail on his Blackberry and it looked terrible!’”

Looking into existing research on mobile e-mail, Stewart says, turned up either “deafening silence” or advice on optimizing for specific devices, mostly the RIM Blackberry. “That’s great, but it’s not the whole market now and will be a smaller proportion going forward,” he says. So Exact Target set out to investigate how users interact with e-mail over smartphones, how the most common handsets treat e-mail optimized for the PC or laptop browser, and what marketers might want to do to produce the best away-from-home e-mail experience.

The study, published in mid-July, consisted of an online survey of 4000 current mobile phone owners, response testing with selected Exact Target clients to see which e-mail formats produced the highest response, and a bench-test of the ways the same e-mail could be rendered across 45 different mobile devices common in the U.S.

Some demographic notes first: Exact Target found that mobile e-mail users are typically 18-44, employed full-time or self-employed, highly educated and affluent. Nineteen percent of mobile phone owners of household income over $100,000 use their phones to access e-mail, and 38% with annual household incomes over $200,000 do the same.

Right now, those stats conform to the picture of mobile e-mail as a business app. But Exact Target also found that retirees, homemakers and students show a strong “intent to by” an e-mail-enabled mobile phone in the next six months, suggesting that new category growth is coming in the mobile e-mail audience.

As for how those users are working with mobile e-mail, Exact Target found most respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing that their mobile e-mail habits differ sharply from their use of e-mail on a desktop or laptop. While 87% said they accessed the same e-mail over mobile phone and over a PC, 58% of those surveyed said they spend less time looking at e-mail from a mobile phone than they do on a desktop or laptop. Not surprising, since mobile e-mail checking tends to happen while users are also doing something else: during a meeting or class (61%), in a stopped car (73%), in bed (43%), in a restroom (40%) or in a car while driving (39%).

Partly because of this divided attention, Exact Target found, more than half of respondents (58%) agreed or strongly agreed that they spent less time looking at individual e-mail on their smartphones than they did using a PC at home or the office.

Asked to give open responses on how mobile e-mail was better than stationary e-mail, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed told Exact Target than in fact, it isn’t better—just more convenient. Complaints ranged from small smartphone keyboards to hard-to-read screens and difficulties handling attachments in mobile e-mail.

“When we asked what was better about e-mail on a desktop or laptop, we heard that users can respond more easily, can click through or respond, can do what the sender wants them to do: ‘I can take action,’” Stewart says. “So if as e-mail marketers we ask ourselves how we can get readers to take action, then the answer is, probably not on a mobile device—unless you’re selling ring tones or other mobile content.”

What the respondents valued about mobile e-mail was convenience and the ability to stay connected. That said, the group surveyed reported being very selective about what e-mail they read on their mobile devices, looking for urgent messages from family and friends. Commercial e-mail got much less attention from this group, with 56% saying they were less likely to read e-mail newsletters or promotional offers on their mobile devices than on their PCs. And only 54% reported ever clicking through a mobile e-mail link to get to a landing page.

Those stats are not as dire as they seem. Instead of opening that offer in their mobile e-mail, 55% of respondents said they flag the message, either technically or with a mental note, and then open it later on a more user-friendly desktop or laptop.

Then too, respondents said they were not any more likely to delete e-mail unread in the mobile environment than on a PC. So messages that reach prospects first via mobile e-mail are at least not being penalized for the fact.

Given that user habits are different in mobile e-mail, Exact Target wanted to test the feasibility of adopting some optimum design standard for smartphone e-mail. The firm sent the same standard multi-part MIME e-mail message to a field of 20 different PDA and smartphone models from the dozen top manufacturers, using 6 different operating systems, 10 different e-mail clients and 5 data carriers, for a total of 45 device configurations.

The conclusion: Almost every device/ OS/ client/ carrier combo rendered the same e-mail differently, and sometimes in significant ways.

“Based on variances by manufacturer, data provider, operating system and e-mail client alone, Exact Target estimates that there are thousands of potential rendering scenarios that make up sending a ‘mobile version’ of an e-mail,” the report concludes. “Unfortunately, designing for each scenario is not a viable solution for e-mail marketers.” In other words, it’s too early to worry about producing e-mail campaigns specifically targeting mobile devices.

Stewart says the urge to produce a dedicated mobile e-mail version may harken back to the early days of the channel when mailers often turned out an HTML version of their message and another specifically aimed at AOL users. “That mindset says, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve seen this problem before, and we’ll fix it by creating a mobile version’,” he says. “But that begs the question, what does a ‘mobile version’ look like?”

Since most mobile e-mail clients don’t support scripting, marketers can’t send out a single mobile version and let the user’s browser figure out how best to display the e-mail. In other words, no matter how they try to optimize e-mail for mobile rendering, a whole lot of mobile recipients are still going to get a compromised experience.

In terms of best practices for getting a message through on mobile e-mail, Exact Target’s investigation found the best click-through results when the message consisted of some introductory text or teaser copy high up and then, lower down, a link that let viewers click to see the message as a Web page if they chose.

Putting the text portion first is important, Stewart says. Since mobile browsers don’t offer preview panes, most users who even bother to open a commercial message in mobile are only going to see the first portion of the message before deciding whether or not to flag it for later handling.

In about 50% to 60% of the cases, a message sent in multi-part MIME will simply appear as text anyway in a mobile e-mail reader. But that beats the garbled versions that can result when mobile users try to view an HTML e-mail message. Even putting the “View as Web page” button at the top of the message can fill a mobile screen full of URL characters; better to push all those elements down, rely on text first and then give readers who’ve flagged your message a chance to switch to the HTML version once they’re back home, at the office, or in a Wi-Fi hotspot.

As kind of an added extra, the Exact Target report—written four days after the Apple iPhone’s June 29 launch-- includes a few observations on the tricks and traps of sending e-mail to the iPhone itself. The device’s Safari browser supports rich HTML, and if Apple does nearly as well with the iPhone as it did with the iPod, it could exert a pull-through effect on other phone makers and increase the number of available phones with high-capability browsers.

“That means the mix of text and HTML that we recommend is the right one—for now,” Stewart says. “Talk to me in a year and it could all be very different.”

A couple of observations from Exact Target on e-mail performance and rendering on the iPhone

* The iPhone shows up to five lines of e-mail text in its Apple Mail inbox, as a simplified version of a preview pane. Open and click-through rates might be lower than on other smartphones.

* “From” names get cut to about 13 characters of the first and final word. For example, an e-mail from “Best Buy News” might render as from “Best News”. Mailers should be checking to make sure their “from” names render coherently—or at least don’t render as something embarrassing.

* Users will get a different view of their Web-based e-mail (such as Hotmail) depending on whether they’re using their iPhone in landscape or portrait view. Again, mailers should test to see how their messages display in both orientations.

* Keep your e-mail messages lightweight for mobile users. Right now AT&T, the only network enabling the iPhone, is using a network design that can produce slow image uploads on popular e-mail sites such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! and AOL.