Clickatell and the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council have released the findings of a strategic text messaging survey that highlights corporate messaging trends across new devices, gateways and applications. The findings indicate that Short Message Service (SMS) mobile text messaging has blossomed into a critical mechanism enabling enterprises and governments to instantly send urgent alerts and notifications to support customer service, marketing, emergency management, and other time-critical business functions. Further, half of the companies surveyed expect to increase their usage of SMS in the coming year due to the immediacy, mobility, and affordability that the medium offers.

Four hundred and fifty professionals worldwide responded to Clickatell's commissioned study, which was conducted by the CMO Council, a global affinity group of senior marketing executives and brand decision makers, and the Forum for the Advancement of the Mobile Experience (FAME). Respondents, who include a mix of Clickatell customers and non-customers with job functions from operations to marketing to IT, represent a wide range of industries and global regions interested in the advancement of text messaging.

Key Findings:

An overwhelming majority consider text messaging to be a key means to send alerts and notifications (83%).

More than seven out of ten respondents said they have used text messaging for business purposes.

Of these, more than a third said they used it primarily for customer service and support. Marketing and emergency management uses followed closely behind.

More than a third of respondents (36%) said they would increase their usage from the previous year.

These findings are consistent with other industry data that shows rapidly growing text messaging, expected to be a US$50bn market by 2010, according to Portio Research. IDC reports that text messaging traffic will blaze the wireless messaging trail for the United States and will soar to 47bn messages per year globally by 2008.
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