Quick Facts

Mobile Marketing

More text than talk – People now text more than they talk on their phones. The gap in favor of texts is even greater for younger adults and teens.

Opt-in text behavior is like search – consumers “raising their hands” – but texting is more versatile than search. It can be used for branding, customer acquisition/loyalty, as well as direct marketing.

Texting permits immediate response – Because mobile phones are always with consumers, short codes allow for immediate response to advertising and marketing. Short codes can go anywhere as a call-to-action mechanism: on a movie poster, billboard, TV commercial, newspaper ad, in-store display or kiosks.

Text marketing is highly effective – and typically more effective – than online advertising with response rates that range from 2X to 10X higher. In addition, research has shown consumers read text messages within four minutes of delivery compared with email, which is read on average within 48 hours of receipt.

Today, the total population of U.S. mobile subscribers is roughly 80 million larger than the U.S. Internet population. The subset of mobile subscribers who are “regular” text users is growing but already equal to roughly 81% of the total U.S. Internet population.

The United States has seen incredible growth in text messaging volumes, now at roughly 3.5 billion per day!

The following are a sampling of the range of use cases for text-based marketing:

  • Mobile couponing and loyalty program acquisition
  • List building (email or mobile)
  • Use in traditional media as a call-to-action mechanism (and analytics tool to measure response)
  • Use in traditional media as an analytics tool or way to measure campaign response
  • Brand engagement tool (voting, contests, polling)
  • Contextual and/or geotargeted advertising (travel content featuring hotel or rental car ads)
  • Sale-related notifications, product updates and deal alerts
  • In-event or on-site marketing and audience interactions (concerts, conferences, airports)
  • 97% of text messages are opened (83% of those within one hour)
  • The opt-out rate is tiny (2 out of 1,000)
  • Surveys have shown that every dollar spent on text-based marketing drives an additional $9.34 in incremental sales