SMS Advertising “Nearly Ubiquitous” In Europe; US Users Most Responsive: Report

Some people dismiss SMS advertising as annoying spam that clutters up their mobile inboxes, but others think it may be the most effective way of targeting customers today. A new survey from M:Metrics claims that nearly 148 million SMS-based ads have been sent out across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The ads that have received the best response have been those related to mobile phone goods and services, and for news and information or entertainment-related services.

The survey also confirms perhaps one of the most annoying facts about SMS advertising: a good proportion of it — 27 percent — is not coming from mobile operators and is therefore largely unsolicited.

The report findings seem to indicate that the prevalence of SMS advertising and its effectiveness work as an inverse variation: the more SMS ads there are, the less likely they will get a response. So while Spain’s mobile users get the most SMS advertising — of the users surveyed, 75.4 percent said they had received SMS ads — they have the lowest response rate at 6.1 percent. Only 17.2 percent of users in the U.S. say they have received SMS ads, but overall the response rate was the highest of the countries surveyed at 12 percent.

Evan Neufeld, a senior analyst at M:Metrics: “The early days of SMS advertising are similar to the advent of e-mail, which was initially a very effective, high conversion advertising platform. However, e-mail’s value decreased over time because of over messaging and spam. Hopefully, the personal nature of the mobile phone will be a barrier against marketers killing the goose that lays the golden egg by taking a similar tack.” (release)

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