November 20, 2014
Brainstorm Mobile Solutions, a provider of multi-channel customer engagement solutions to brand owners, enterprises and mobile operators, has released statistics showing that in the last year they sent over 1.5 billion mobile messages to subscribers in 198 countries – equivalent to one in every 3 unique mobile subscribers globally.
Other statistics show a significant year-on-year growth of the volume of users being registered to its platform, up 18% to 556 million since the same period last year, indicating that the market for A2P (Application to Person) messaging is certainly on the rise. Another noteworthy statistical trend is the doubling in volume of MMS messages sent during 2014, highlighting the increasing trend to embrace rich media technology to drive improved customer experience and brand engagement.
The data was collected from Dragon, Brainstorm’s customer engagement Platform, which delivers marketing offers, customer service and care messages that are enhanced with location, context, and personalised intelligence. The messages are delivered to consumers on behalf of brands through tier one mobile operators such as Telefónica and global marketing agencies such as WEVE, Amobee, M&C Saatchi, and several other agencies under the WPP umbrella.
The growth in demand for more sophisticated, personalised and location-aware communications created using Brainstorm’s business intelligence engine is soaring, with a doubling in the volume of processing jobs from 1.6 billion in 2013 to 3.75 billion in the current year. This type of personalisation applies multi-layered intelligence to mobile messages using location as well as contextual triggers such as weather and pollen count, combined with individual customer needs, interests and behaviour.
Of the 198 countries, the highest number of recipients receiving messages was firstly the UK, followed by Brazil and Mexico, confirming a trend highlighted by Portio Research pointing to Latin America as one of the most vibrant SMS marketplaces in the world and a MAVAM report citing the fact that 89% of Mexican smartphone users use SMS as a daily communications tool.
Commenting on the findings Brainstorm CEO Donald Stuart said: “These statistics show that - contrary to popular belief - mobile messaging, is experiencing real growth as a preferred means of communication by marketers and customer service professionals to their consumers. SMS was the first messaging app ever invented and will always be the de-facto standard for reliable, quick and economic communications, despite co-existing in a market with other fashionable OTT players.
Brands and retailers are seeing the value that multi-channel platforms such as ours can bring to their mobile strategy and through them we have seen our user base increase to 556 million – that’s more reach than Twitter, Barclays and Amazon all put together”. He added, “Technological advances in our platform mean that we can tailor a message to be perfectly timed and personalised to reflect the recipient’s interests, behaviour, preferred channel of communication and location. We can even add further intelligence to this powerful cocktail such as the weather, pollen count or traffic density offering even greater potential for marketing and customer service creativity in developing highly targeted and effective engagements.”
Karl Whitfield, analyst at Portio Research, specialists in mobile messaging added: “SMS has always been the first and most simple way to communicate a short message between any two mobile phones on the planet. A2P SMS is booming as ‘the new email’, with blistering high response rates. SMS versus OTT is a myth, there is no “versus”, they run parallel and we keep seeing the SMS volume increase as this vast quarter-trillion dollar industry keeps growing.”