In the digital marketing age, connecting with customers means having a keen understanding of how customers want to be contacted. Channels that worked just a few years ago may no longer working, so gaining new insights often involves a thorough evaluation of shifting consumer preferences. Today, engagement is most prevalent on the smartphone, and one means of communication stands out above the others:
SMS.
So, mobile engagement platform solutions provider Vibes recently announced the findings from its comprehensive annual Consumer Insights survey for 2024. Vibes surveyed a broad range of over 1,000 mobile-centric consumers with the intention of understanding what their relationship with their smartphones looks like today; how this has changed over multiple years, how they prefer to interact with brands on their phones, and how these interactions help or hinder their path to purchase.
The survey revealed the near ubiquity of SMS adoption by both brands and their consumers, with 75% of consumers reporting that text messages from brands routinely drive them to make purchases. In retail settings, this could be a text that drives an immediate online purchase or offline store visit; in quick-serve restaurants, a typical use case might be a discounted in-restaurant offer to drive foot traffic, or a coupon redeemed through use of a Mobile Wallet.
The study also found that more than half of consumers – 54% – indicated that they have made a purchase based on a mobile wallet offer they received from a brand, and nearly 60% have used a mobile wallet-stored loyalty card when making an offline or online purchase. Whereas mobile wallet was once reserved primarily to house digital versions of credit cards, an additional 52% of consumers now say they use mobile wallet for storing items other than credit cards, such as loyalty cards, offers, coupons, gift cards and event tickets.
In their conclusions about the data, the study’s authors indicated that the rapid adoption of SMS and Mobile Wallet clearly opens an opportunity for brands looking to drive more in-store and in-location traffic, given 98% open rates for SMS and the ability to directly attribute the ROI that Mobile Wallet drives for their business.
“Every time we’ve conducted the Consumer Insights survey, we’ve seen tremendous year-over-year gains in consumer enthusiasm for SMS from the brands they love, as well as how they’re adopting and using Mobile Wallet”, said Alex Campbell, Vibes’ co-founder and CIO. “Vibes’ comprehensive research has shown that marketers see 19x more revenue per message from their campaigns that use both SMS + Mobile Wallet, versus just sending SMS messages by themselves.”
Edited by
Alex Passett
