Text Messaging huge with Young Adults.

But no mass influence yet for text marketing

Text messaging is especially popular with US adults ages 18 to 34, according to Universal McCann’s 2008 “Media in Mind” study. Respondents from that age group sent an average of 13 text messages every week.

In last year’s survey, nearly one-half of all US adults said they had never sent a text message. This year only 41% said so. Among 18 to 34 year-olds surveyed this year, just 22% had never sent a text message, down from the 38% the prior year.

“The great unwashed—those people who have never sent a text message—is getting smaller all the time,” said Graeme Hutton, senior vice president at Universal McCann, in a MediaPost article.

Text messaging is still new for many marketers, as evidenced by a February 2008 ExactTarget study. The proportion of Internet users surveyed who owned a mobile phone and had made a purchase after receiving a text message was a paltry 6%. That percentage was higher among younger users, but still mostly in the single digits.

Such low numbers could be interpreted to mean that text messages are not a very effective way to market, but they might also just reflect that such marketing is still relatively rare.

A December 2007 BIGresearch study of US Internet users found similarly low text message influence: 6.4% of respondents said they had bought electronics because of text messages, and still fewer said they had influenced purchases of other types of goods.

If mobile marketing is to move beyond the experimental budget stage, text messaging is likely to be part of the mix, in part since the messages lend themselves to existing terminology and benchmarks, according to John du Pre Gauntt, senior analyst at eMarketer.

“Mobile messaging is tailor-made for getting mobile marketing past the early adopter stage and into the mainstream,” Mr. Gauntt said. “Messaging has a clear currency—that is, messages sent, received, opened or acted upon—for all parts of the mobile marketing chain to use.”

Courtesy of http://www.emarketer.com