The complete guide to mobile messaging and marketing

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If you contact the team at MOBIT you will soon realize that they are not shy about singing the praises of ... (Dimension
Texting has been around for over two decades. Over the last few years as email has become less and less effective, business marketers have been searching for a channel that could serve to augment their marketing and communications activities. It is only now just hitting its stride when it comes to business to business marketing and it has a long way to go. Previously seen as just a way to send silly photos and emoticons between individual phone users, (to some extent it still is), text messaging is now being viewed as a powerful way for businesses to connect with their customers. The limiting factor though of 160 characters per message has been until recently a fundamental flaw in the technology. It is also far less intelligent that its email cousin and until recently did not have the automation and rich content attributes that marketers have come to expect from email. In short, text messaging fell short at the last mile to deliver the complete solution.

It is however widespread, affordable, real-time, and very flexible. It is also simple, brief, preferred, and can be used across virtually any industry with great effectiveness, and unlike its social media and messaging peers, it does not suffer from the exclusionary problem most of these other platforms are somewhat hindered with when it comes to B2B marketing and communications.

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This exclusionary impact stems from the fact that to communicate with mass audiences, the application or messaging platform must be ubiquitous. The diagram below puts this in perspective. Even the goliath of Facebook cannot compete with the reach and ubiquity of email and text.

Text messaging then with over 6.1 billion users worldwide clearly has the upper hand. No application download is required, there is no user name or password and it a standard function on every single mobile phone sold around the world. From any age group, if you have a mobile phone, by default you can receive and send a text message. So what’s the problem? From a marketing perspective, a traditional text message lacks all the functionality required by modern marketers of today. There is little to no automation, no behavioural analytics, no integration to email and marketing systems, and above all, it is void of the rich content we now expect to have delivered to our smartphone devices. On the face of it, text appears to have finally reached a point in its lifecycle where user behaviour and device technology of the day has rendered it about as useless as the typewriter or fax machine.

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On April 14th 2014, a new mobile marketing and messaging platform called MOBIT was launched onto the world stage at the Infusionsoft annual user conference (ICON) in Phoenix Arizona. Infusionsoft is one of the largest and most popular email and marketing automation platforms in the world. MOBIT was a huge hit, and today has thousands of users, with their platform having delivered tens of thousands of campaigns and many tens of millions of text messages (SMS and MMS). A traditional text provider though, they are not.

The uniqueness of MOBIT is the sum of the ‘core pillars’ underpinning its software, SMS and MMS delivery, mobile optimized and intelligent pages, integration to email and marketing automation platforms, its own advanced automation capabilities and contact management center (CRM), all delivered at a price point affordable to any small to medium sized business. 3

MOBITs strategy was endorsed by the CEO and Co-founder of Infusionsoft Clate Mask when he recently commented “if you are not using mobile messaging with Infusionsoft then you should be…”

If you contact the team at MOBIT you will soon realize that they are not shy about singing the praises of ‘mobile messaging’. You will also notice that they do not use the term ‘text messaging’. That’s because in the words of their CEO Sean McDonald, “there is simply daylight between MOBIT and the thousands of text providers out there. Text is the platform we use for delivery, but the content, the user experience and end outcome for marketers is a whole different ball of wax”. So that’s enough of the marketing pitch for MOBIT! Outlined below are 42 texting statistics that we garnered from our internet research on why text messaging is such a powerful business tool.

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Texting is the most widely-used and frequently used app on a smartphone, with 97% of Americans using it at least once a day. (Pew Internet)

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People worldwide will send 8.3 trillion text messages in just this year alone. That’s almost 23 billion messages per day, or almost 16 million messages per minute. (Portio Research)

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Over 6 billion text messages are sent in the U.S. each day. (Forrester)

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Over 80% of American adults text, making it the most common cell phone activity. (Pew Internet)

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Text messages have a 98% open rate, while email has only a 15% open rate at best. (Mobile Marketing Watch)

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Text messaging has a 45% response rate, while email only has a 3% response rate. (Velocify)

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Texting takes up 14.1% of cell phone users’ time. (Nielsen)

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90% of all text messages are read in under 3 minutes. (Connect Mogul)

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75% of phones worldwide (4.5 billion) are text-enabled (DuoCall Communications)

10. Americans sent 69,000 texts every second in 2012 (CTIA) 11. The average adult spends a total of 23 hours a week texting (USA Today) 12. The average Millennial exchanges an average of 67 text messages per day (Business Insider) 13. On average, Americans exchange twice as many texts as they do calls (Nielsen) 5

14. Only 43% of smartphone owners use their phone to make calls, but over 70% of smartphone users text (Connect Mogul) 15. 55% of heavy text message users (50+ texts per day) say they would prefer to receive a text over a phone call (Pew Research Center) 16. In 2011, 31% of Americans said they preferred text messages to phone calls (Pew Research Center) 17. It takes the average person 90 minutes to respond to email, but only 90 seconds to respond to a text message. (CTIA) 18. American women text 14% more than men. (Nielsen) 19. 79% of companies believe customers want SMS/text support. (ICMI) 20. 38% of contact centers currently offer SMS, and 23% have plans to add it in the next 12 months. That means 61% of contact centers will offer SMS support in 2016. (Dimension Data) 21. 80% of people are currently using texting for business. (eWeek) 22. One in five consumers is just as likely to prefer a text message from a business to a phone call. (ICMI) 23. The activities people with text capabilities would most prefer to do via text are: check order status (38%) schedule or change appointments (32%) and make or confirm reservations (31%). (Harris poll) 24. Over half of customers said they would be likely to text with a customer support agent. Similarly, 52 percent would prefer texting customer support over their current preferred form of communication. (eWeek) 25. A 2012 study found that text was the highest rated contact method for customer satisfaction out of all other customer communication channels. Text earned 90 out of 100 points, while phone earned 77 out of 100 and Facebook earned 66. (CFI Group)

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26. Millenials prefer automated text messaging over IVR, including speech-based solutions (Frost & Sullivan) 27. Over one-third of business professionals say they can’t go 10 minutes without responding to a text. (eWeek) 28. At least five types of social media channels are used in more than 50% of call centers, including SMS/texting (VoIP Info) 29. Sales prospects who are sent text messages convert at a rate 40% higher than those who are not sent any text messages. (Velocify) 30. Over 80% of people use text messaging for business, and 15% said that more than half their messages are for business purposes. (eWeek) 31. Almost 25% of marketers are currently using text messaging. Over 65% of them report SMS as being “very effective.” (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) 32. 70% of U.S. consumers appreciate getting texts or emails from healthcare providers. (Loyalty 360) 33. 75% of people would like to have offers sent to them via SMS. (Digital Marketing Magazine) 34. Over 80% of people would only like to receive a maximum of two marketing messages per month. (Digital Marketing Magazine) 35. 44% of consumers with texting capabilities would prefer to press a button to initiate a text conversation immediately, rather than waiting on hold to speak with an agent. (Harris Poll) 36. Texting in the sales process can lead to conversion gains of more than 100%. However, sending text messages before establishing contact with a prospect can adversely affect both contact and conversion rates. (Velocify)

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37. 20% of financial services companies use mobile messaging to ensure business continuity and add to their multichannel capabilities. (Loyalty 360) 38. 77% of consumers with texting capabilities aged 18-34 are likely to have a positive perception of a company that offers text capability. (Harris Poll) 39. 44% of consumers would rather receive product details and other marketing messages through text over any other channel. (Direct Marketing Association) 40. 72% of business professionals prefer texting to messaging apps. (eWeek) 41. Nearly 70% of employees think their organization should use text messaging to communicate with employees, and 86% say it should not be reserved for just customer communication. (Vitiello Communications Group) 42. 64% of all consumers are likely to have a positive perception of a company that offers texting as a service channel (Harris Poll).

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