It does not require rocket science to know that mobile messaging is one of the most popular modes of communication in today’s context and studies reveal it is going to remain so for times to come, till 2020, at least. It is not just the kind of personal messages exchanged between friends or family members, but even businesses and professions are also gearing up to make those course corrections required to make their messages reach their prospective customers. There are obvious reasons for this.
98% of messages are read
The major factor that needs to be considered is the result of a recent survey that seems to suggest that the rate of opening of messages is as high as 98%, whereas the corresponding figure for emails is just 22%.).
It is possible some of the commercial messages sent through the email route may have been filtered or sent to the spam box and so on, but this is the reality and one has to accept it. The survey goes on to reveal that though emails can also be read on the mobile phone itself, the chances of people opening and reading the emails remain slim. It is also mentioned that the mobile messages get read within 3 minutes of the message being delivered to the recipient, 9 out of 10 times. All these facts indicate how strong the medium or channel has become for any communicator, anywhere in the world. Obviously, the marketers are already working on these lines.
The numbers are staggering
Another fact one has to acknowledge is that the channel is already an evolved one, with 2.1 billion people worldwide subscribing to some service provider or the other for messaging.
Demographically also it cuts across age and gender and other barriers. It may not be a homogeneous community, but definitely, within specific geographic locations, the messages can be effectively communicated. The most important thing, from the commercial point of view, is that this membership is only growing and is projected to keep growing.
Additionally, the medium and the technology has been fully accepted and adopted by the users of messaging applications. This has also been one of the revelations from the study, that people at various levels use messaging for everyday applications and they are comfortable with it.
Lastly, for the channel of communication to succeed, businesses will have to make a few adjustments and adopt new technologies. Just as customers receive an automated response to their emails now, chatbots may have to be created to respond to messages 24/7 and even provide appropriate reply messages without the customer knowing that it is being sent devoid of human intervention.
So go ahead and keep messaging.