世論 What Japan Thinks

The 27th regular survey of mobile phone users’ use of computers, conducted by goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com, focused on the theme of email newsletters, and in particular mobile phone email newsletters.

Demographics

Between the 9th and 11th of May 2011 1,052 mobile phone using members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a mobile phone-based questionnaire. 55.5% of the sample were female, 3.3% in their teens, 22.8% in their twenties, 37.3% in their thirties, 26.9% in their forties, and 9.7% aged 50 or older.

Decomail is a registered trademark of docomo, an abbreviation of “decorated email”. “HTML email” is probably the more familiar English term for it, email with embedded graphics.

I am subscribed to four low-volume (once a week or so) mailing lists on my mobile phone, one from DCMX (docomo’s credit card) which is quite decomail heavy, one from Mr Donuts that has just emoji, and two others that are text only, although one of the text ones sets the font colour to grey for some strange reason.

Research results

From the complete sample, 82.2%, or 865 people, read email newsletters. Looking back over the last six times the question was asked, there is perhaps a small one or two percentage point downward trend. Of these, 787 people, or 91.0% of the newsletter readers, read them on their mobile phones. How many people were mobile phone-only was not reported, however.

Q1: About how many of the newsletters that you read use decomail? (Sample size=787)

All have decomail (to SQ)	0.3%
Lots have decomail (to SQ)	20.7%
Few have decomail (to SQ)	52.7%
None have decomail	26.3%

Q1SQ: What do you think about decomail in newsletters? (Sample size=580)

Like it	9.7%
Not bothered	69.0%
Wish it wasn’t there	21.4%

The number of haters has recently been dropping, with the article suggesting that perhaps people are getting used to it and as smartphone share grows companies are choosing decomail over emoji.