Nearly one in three adults in the UK now uses a smartphone, according to a report by the telecoms regulator Ofcom. The report also found that surfing the internet via mobile phones is the fastest growing mobile media activity with 1 million new users during the first quarter of 2010 (taking the total to 13.5 million, compared to 9 million in the first quarter of 2009)
Data from network operators showed that 16 million people in the UK accessed the Internet from their mobile phone in December. They viewed a total of 6.7 billion pages and spent 4.8 billion minutes online. Source: Reuters
Research by the Mobile Marketing Association and Lightspeed Reseach shows that almost 50% of respondents noticed advertisements in July 2010 that were delivered to their mobile phone. 32% of people who had seen an advert interacted or responded to it in the last month. Almost half of consumers who responded to Mobile advert reported purchasing its product or service.
According to the CTIA / The Wireless Association (www.ctia.org) over 96% of phones in use in 2009 were capable of receiving SMS messaging. It is not surprising that Short Code campaigns are proven to be more effective than traditional marketing methods such as email or banner ads. SMSbased campaigns achieve over a 90 percent opt-in rate, compared to 22.1 percent for email.
Response rates are significantly greater the traditional forms of advertising with the average SMS response rate typically ranging between 15 to 30 percent, compared to 5 percent for email and 2.61 percent for direct mail.
Ofcom figures suggest that 97.5% of all text messages are read within five seconds of being received.
Despite the increasing use of internet-based communications services such as social networking sites and instant messaging, the numbers of text messages sent by mobile users continued to climb, growing by nearly one-third to 104.4 billion messages in 2009 (representing an average of over four a day for every person in the UK), a faster rate of growth than in 2008 (24.8%) but on a similar level to annual growth between 2005 and 2007 (See below). Meanwhile, the volume of MMS grew by just 5.8% during 2009 to around half a billion messages.
