SMS Marketing Statistics 2013

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They’ve always said, “Numbers never lie.” Here at Anchor, we strongly believe in this concept along with the fact that metrics are the best measurement to prove that ANYTHING works. Luckily, we’ve been able to come across a ton of information directly related to the success of mobile marketing and SMS marketing, and we’d like to share this information with you. These SMS marketing statistics and numbers are a great way to get a better illustration of the mobile marketing landscape we see today, and how consumers are using their phones, smartphones, and text messages to access information, get deals and discounts from brands, and research and communicate in general. So, without further ado, let us launch into the numbers!

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SMS Marketing By The Numbers

-The average person looks at their phone 150 times per day! (Tweet This!)

-SMS produces 6-8 times MORE engagement than email! (Tweet This!)

-Only 20% of all emails are read. (Tweet This!)

-Only 12% of Facebook posts are read. (Tweet This!)

-Only 29% of tweets are read. (Tweet This!)

-A whopping 98% of SMS messages are read! (Tweet This!)

-70% of people in the United States have stated that they would like to receive offers from brands on their mobile devices. (Tweet This!)

-68% of people in the United Kingdom have stated that they would like to receive offers from brands on their mobile devices. (Tweet This!)

-The average response time for an email (business to community) is 2 days. (Tweet This!)

-The average response time for a text message is only 90 seconds! (Tweet This!)

-Email only experiences a 4.2% click-through rate. (Tweet This!)

-SMS experiences a whopping 19% click-through rate! (Tweet This!)

-SMS coupons are 10 TIMES more likely to be redeemed! (Tweet This!)

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If you would like to get the inforgraphic with all of these statistics on it, then be sure to check out ourinforgraphics page. These SMS marketing statistics can be used for a number of things, especially to give statistical and numerical evidence that SMS marketing DOES, in fact, work. It isn’t a secret anymore that everyone is using mobile devices, so if you’re not mobile yet, you are only asking to fade into the sunset, forgotten by anyone and everyone who is relevant in the industry, including your customers. Go mobile TODAY and harness all of these people who are using mobile. These numbers don’t lie, so you don’t have to either.

SMS Marketing Software Improvements

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In a world where everything is constantly evolving, we thought we’d keep up! We’ve recently made quite a few improvements to our SMS Marketing Software to stay up with mobile marketing trends.

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For starters, the whole statistics reporting system has been upgraded. Within the system, you now can go 18 months back into your records from the statistics search page. This lets you see just how well mobile marketing is working for you.

You now have the power of image uploads from the wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get) editor on mobile landing pages and the Applications tool.

Speaking of the Apps tool, it’s got its fair share of upgrades as well. Now, within our platform, our apps tool has a template system, footer images and descriptions, domain masking, and more.

In the upgraded QR Code portion of out SMS Marketing Program, you can now have colored codes and vCards. So, instead of havng just the standard black and white QR codes, you can add that little “something extra” in QR Codes with a pop of color.

Overall, system throughput has increased substantially. (Throughput meaning the average rate of successful message delivery–this means more messages getting to where they need to go and getting your marketing messages out there!)

In our SMS marketing Software, we offer our digital publishing tool. We’re currently working on a few more nifty bells and whistles, including a QR Code based coupon redemption system. Stay tuned for the latest and greatest with our platform changes!

Not a user of out SMS Marketing program yet? Give us a yell and get started today.
Not sure about mobile marketing? Check out some stats and see for yourself: mobile marketing is a smart choice for any marketing plan. Own a small business and still not convinced? Check out our recent blog post about how we can help you work mobile marketing into your plans today, without breaking the bank.

SMS Marketing For Hotels and Spas

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SMS mobile marketing is, simply put, a wunderkind; not just because of its ability to quickly and efficiently reach customers in real time, but it can be used for so many different types of businesses, hotels and spas included. A lot of mobile marketing is not taken advantage of simply because businesses do not think it can help them much, or they don’t know how to use it. This a big problem, because if your business is not integrating SMS mobile marketing into its marketing strategy, you are losing to anyone else who IS using it. Don’t be one of those businesses; let us help you!

SMS mobile marketing is already being integrated into many hotels’ and spa’s marketing strategies, and it is working for them. It improves customer service, encourages customer loyalty, and promotes bookings of rooms, restaurants, and spa treatments. It helps maintain a long and lasting relationship with your customers, and increases the likelihood that they will return to your business. Something as simple as automatically sending a “Thank You” message to each customer that visits your hotel or spa goes a long way in building relationships with your customers. This also builds customer loyalty and could lead to more customers coming into your business based simply off of good word-of-mouth reviews given by previous customers. You can also send messages offering discounts, special offers, or encourage future bookings from that same customer by maintaining a relationship through text messaging. Using SMS marketing to communicate with customers not only increases the amount of contact you have with your customers, which leads to more revenue, but your contact becomes much more personal to the customer, since they are communicating with you through their mobile phones as opposed to them seeing your marketing through more traditional marketing channels (television, radio, billboards, newspaper ads, etc.) People have been bombarded with traditional marketing so much that they have become immune to it. They are NOT, however, immune to text message marketing. Take advantage of this!

Of course, the best part about all of this is that SMS mobile marketing is CHEAP! You are spending pennies per text as opposed to the thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands you would be spending on traditional marketing. Plus, it’s way more effective! There is NO other marketing method you can use that will get your message directly sent to your customers hands. Plus, statistics and surveys show that people open up and respond to text messages quicker than any other medium! (Within 4 minutes to be exact.) This is perfect for hotels and spas to use because that is exactly what you are trying to create. A personal relationship with the customer that isn’t invasive, doesn’t annoy them, and doesn’t feel spammy. You can also add to the relationship by sending them messages for their birthdays (you could include a discount for this one) or holiday wishes (discounts would work with this too.) The possibilities are endless! So what are you waiting for?!?! Get started on integrating SMS mobile marketing into your hotel or spa’s marketing strategy today and reap the rewards!

Why SMS Mobile Marketing Is Here To Stay

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The secret is out, and has been for awhile now; SMS mobile marketing is here to stay. If you haven’t heard of SMS mobile marketing, or have heard of it but don’t know anything about it, then you must have been living under a rock lately. If we were to say that the SMS text message market is growing at an astounding rate, we still feel we would be making an understatement. The fact is that SMS mobile marketing is EXPLODING, and it is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. The most important thing to gather from this article is that SMS is not just a flash in the pan type thing, statistics and analytics have shown that SMS marketing has, and will continue to thrive in the coming years. So if you’re not marketing at all using SMS mobile marketing, you better start before all the companies who are already using it pass you up and leave you in the dust. Don’t believe us? Let us prove it.

Consider this; 83% of all U.S. adults own a mobile phone, a third of them prefer text messages over phone calls, and 95% of all text messages are opened within 4 minutes of arrival. However, marketing emails are only responded to 6% of the time, ever. This means a shocking majority, or 94%, of all the marketing emails you are sending are not being read at all. It’s obvious that SMS marketing has a higher response rate than email. In fact, almost 50% of all marketing text messages are not just read, but responded to. Statistics also show that the demand for SMS short codes, MMS, and instant messaging is constantly growing. It’s also important to remember that about half of the U.S. population has smartphones right now, so that means half of them don’t. So if you’re using a mobile marketing campaign that only targets people who use smartphones, you are only reaching half of the population. Using SMS mobile marketing, which simply sends texts that can be received by any mobile phone, means you will be reaching at least 83% of the population, rather than just half. The numbers don’t lie, with SMS mobile marketing, you cannot lose! 

Now the numbers we mentioned deal with just people who own mobile phones. The 13% of people who don’t own mobile phones is very small, but you can still reach them using SMS mobile marketing. How? Think about this; every person you text has an inner circle of friends, family members, and significant others. This means when you text someone and they like what they’ve received, they can easily share your information with their thousands of Facebook friends, hundreds of Twitter followers, and dozens of Pinterest followers. You also can never underestimate the power of word of mouth. Now, with just one text, you’ve reached all these people, while spending pennies for your advertising. Compare that to the thousands of dollars you could’ve spent on advertising in magazines or newspapers, or the tens of thousands you could’ve spent advertising on television or radio, and it’s clear that SMS marketing is the cheapest and most effective way to reach the people you want to reach. And since SMS marketing is an opt-in service, that means the subscribers you are getting are people who want to hear what you have to say and what you have to offer. Can you honestly think of anything a marketer dreams of more than thousands of people who are listening to them with open ears? Well SMS marketing does this exact thing!

This point cannot be made more clear; there has not been a better time to get you and your company started on an SMS mobile marketing campaign. The numbers show it, the results show it, the returns on investments show it, and several companies who have already incorporated SMS mobile marketing into their marketing strategy can vouch for SMS’ unparalleled success and efficiency. The best part of all of this?

It’s EASY!

SMS Marketing vs. Email Marketing | What’s Better?

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At first glance, SMS marketing and email marketing are actually pretty similar concepts. Both of them are ways to obtain customers’ contact information and both are ways to market to your customer directly. They’re also great ways to build a database of clients and potential clients. Once you’ve made contact with the customer and have gotten a response through either a text message or email, you are already in the lead nurturing process, which means you are that much closer to making the sale and bringing you and your company money. However, the basic concepts of both mediums, building a client list and then marketing directly to them, is about all that SMS marketing and email marketing have in common.

To look at the differences, you have to start with the numbers; and the numbers are absolutely staggering. Firstly, 90% of all emails are spam; the percentage of text messages that are spam? A paltry 1%. So it is no surprise that 98% of text messages are opened compared to email, which only has a 22% open rate. Knowing this, now you know customers and potential clients are clearly more likely to open up a text message you send them than an email. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed. So what about mobile use? Only 34% of people use their phones to email, while 72% of people use text messaging on their phones. You’re also one of few if you text them, with the average person receiving only 178 text messages a month compared to the 1,216 emails the average person receives. Obviously, most of those messages are spam. Did we also mention that 95% of text messages are opened within 15 minutes? Forget about people opening your email in 15 minutes, 20% of emails aren’t even opened ever. Think about what you do personally, are you more likely to read a text message that’s sent to you, or an email?

So, after looking at the numbers, it should be obvious that text message marketing is a much better route to go than email marketing. Using a mobile SMS campaign makes it easy for customers to sign up at any time. Mobile calls-to-action (CTAs) are easily integrated into print, radio, television, store signs, and online networks such as Twitter and Facebook. All they need to do is text your keyword to the shortcode. However, if you were to use email marketing, your customers would have to go to your company’s website and enter their contact information. This can be especially inconvenient for mobile users if your site isn’t mobile friendly yet.

Using SMS marketing, you can literally increase your sales the same day you sent out your messages. Because people respond so quickly to text messaging, it is possible for you to get sales through your doorwithin an hour after sending the messages. And if they’re not coming through your door, you can easily market to them through their phones now that you have their information. Either way, contact has been established. Remember, email marketing does work with mobile phones, but very, very few people read emails on their phones. A majority of people will just go to a computer to read an email; and if they do that they have to print off any offer you may have sent them. With SMS messaging, they can simply show you the text you sent them to receive the offer. It’s much quicker, much easier, and is much more likely to give you the return on investment you and your company desires.

So what are you waiting for? A laundry list of companies have already realized the information you’ve learned here, so NOW is the time to start planning and enacting an SMS mobile campaign for your company. DON’T WAIT, or you will be left behind!

SMS White Label Marketing, How It Can Benefit You

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SMS white label marketing is a way to market your company using someone else’s platform as your own. This would be a version absent of our company logo and information leaving you free to market the program as your own. You can name the program, display your company logo, customize the colors and fonts, and market and sell the program as you see fit.

By rebranding the program we give you, you can make yourself the point of origin for all products and services your company offers. You can charge what you want, for what you want, without having to worry about competing with our company on prices. Outside of the freedom of selling the service as your own, you also gain the power of advertising and marketing your company on an all new level.

The benefits of SMS white label are endless. Text message marketing is great for branding. With today’s bombardment of advertising and marketing everywhere we go, consumers are starting to ignore traditional means of advertising, but they still read and answer text messages. That’s why SMS marketing is so great. It allows you to fight through the noise that is modern day marketing and get your company heard above everyone else. It’s also important to note that it usually takes the customer five positive impressions of your company for them to start knowing, trusting, and eventually buying from you. What better way to build those five positive impressions than through text messaging? It’s faster and it’s easier than any other method of marketing.

SMS white label can also be accessed from virtually anywhere at anytime. You can send out reminders, notifications, etc. through a computer or a mobile phone. You can also access reactions and responses through these same means. Also, as mentioned before, you get flexibility when setting your prices, since it is still viewed as your service.

It’s also extremely easy to monitor customer activity. You can get real-time access to not only incoming and outgoing messages, but you can also view your customers’ credits, account status, and number of keywords. You can also monitor and view your system’s traffic daily, weekly, or monthly.

The most important thing to remember about SMS white label marketing is that it is easy and anyone can do it. It does not matter how experienced you are since we here at AnchorMobile provide customizable promotional materials and support. This is the best way to market in today’s society, and by not implementing this into your company’s marketing strategy, you are doing your company a huge disservice.

Text Messaging Killed The Voicemail Star

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In today’s day and age of faster communication, faster information transfer, and faster ways of getting things done, voicemails are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and annoying. Simply put, when you are at work, sometimes you just don’t have the time to be checking every voicemail left on your phone. It’s also important to note that voicemails are becoming less tolerable because we are conditioned as a society to get the information we need much quicker. Voicemails are time consuming, most lasting at least a minute or two, sometimes longer, and create an unnecessary nuisance when trying to communicate. Time is money, and voicemails cut into your time.

According to a uReach Technologies study, 30 percent of voice messages remain unheard for up to 3 days or longer, and over 20 percent of people with voicemails sitting in their mailbox rarely check them. It has been found that adults under 65 years old respond more quickly to a text message than a voicemail, and adults under 30 years old are four times more likely to respond within minutes to a text message rather than to a voicemail. Ultimately, it takes the average person 6-8 hours to check their voicemail after a message has been left. Leaving a voicemail has essentially become like sending a message in a bottle, someone might pick it up…eventually.

Moving along these same lines, it has become apparent that not only voicemail, but direct mail, telemarketers, email marketers, and call centers are becoming obsolete. People have been bombarded by these forms of advertising and marketing for so long that they have learned how to filter out the noise. This truth is especially prevalent among the younger generation, more specifically anyone under 30 years old. Of course, knowing all this, one has to ask why is this happening?

The truth of the matter is that text messaging has essentially killed the voicemail star, pun intended. The traditional ways of advertising mentioned above are much more intrusive than a simple text message. Through text messaging, people gain a sense of authority and control over what they want to see and what they don’t want to see. They can choose whether to view a text message or not, unlike telemarketers blowing up your phone or email marketers flooding your email. Along with this, even if they view a text message, they still have the option of whether to reply or not, and also the choice of how long they’ll take to respond. Text messaging, especially for business and marketing, has become the forefront of the industry because of the ease and speed at which information is sent and exchanged. If you are still using voicemail, direct mail, email marketing, or telemarketing to drive your marketing, you are doing you and your customers a disservice.

How to Sell SMS as a Marketing Solution

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What do you do when your SMS marketing solution is going to be shot down? You leave it out.

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With so many new and exciting media marketing techniques, it’s no surprise that many company’s hear the word “SMS” and turn to run.

Learning how to sell SMS as a Marketing Solution is all about knowing how to appeal to your client. When your client’s see the fact that having a mobile-friendly website can really benefit them, they’ll be more apt to listen to what you have to say, not only about their mobile site, but also about the benefits that come with having SMS marketing.

We recommend you start in with the fun stuff, like mobile websites and QR codes, then introduce your clients to all the benefits of SMS with a live demo.

You’ll have them hooked. Line, sinker and all.