The results from a new Harris Interactive survey show that consumers are increasingly more open to receiving SMS text messages alerting them to deals at nearby stores, restaurants, and other retail outlets. Some highlights from the survey include:

• Only 1% of consumers say they currently receive deal alerts on their mobile phones but 27% say they would welcome such messages, as long as they came from merchants they’ve given permission to send offers.
• Consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 are the most receptive with 42% of respondents saying they would like to get marketing messages from favored merchants.
• 37% of consumers in households with children would like to receive opt-in alerts and in families with children under six that rises to 44%.
• 22% of mobile phone owners responded that they make an impulse purchase at least once a week based on a sale or special promotional event.

Here at Mobile Commons we’ve seen these trends firsthand with our retail customers. One customer recently ran a 48 hour “weekend only” sale for its mobile subscribers that resulted in a 50% conversion rate and a 10% increase in their average purchase size. Another client has been averaging a $10 return for every text message they’ve sent this year!

If you’re interested in learning more about our program geared specifically to retailers please don’t hesitate to contact us.

The medical journal Pediatrics published a new study showing the effectiveness of using text messages to remind young patients to take their medication.

There were 41 patients in the study who recently underwent a liver transplant. They showed “significant improvement” in medication compliance after 1 year. The media age of the patients was 15.

Mobile Commons has worked with a number of organizations and state health departments, including New York and California, to test the efficacy of using text messaging to improve public health. We’ve seen these organizations and other health-related organizations use mobile technology to help improve smoking cessation rates, increase drug compliance, deliver vaccination reminders, and assist with blood pressure monitoring.

It’s also important to note that the job isn’t finished and there’s still lots more research to be done. As the researchers of the recent study commented, “the results of this pilot study are encouraging, however, larger, randomized controlled studies are needed to establish the efficacy of text messaging in improving medication adherence.”

If your organization is interested in conducting your own study using text messaging or phone calls to improve patient care, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to provide the platform for your research.

The CTIA released its semi annual report this week: over 740 billion text messages were sent in the first half of 2009. That works out to 4.1 billion text messages sent per day in the United States! That’s billion with a “B”. And what’s even more astonishing is that number is twice as many as last year.

With so much media and marketing hype around devices like the iPhone, it’s sometimes easy to forget the true killer mobile apps: phone calls and text messaging. They work on every phone and remain the most effective way to reach people.

So if text messaging is the most popular way to communicate in the world, and it’s popularity continues to grow, why isn’t your organization using it yet?

Our customers have been having amazing success using our text messaging platform to generate phone calls. The following graph shows the number of phone calls made during the 8 hours after a typical SMS broadcast.

As you can see, the response rate is extremely high, but also incredibly fast. This is great when you want to flood phone lines or play a recorded audio message, but doesn’t work very well when connecting to a live operator. For example, when important legislation is on the table, tens of thousands of phone calls are made, sometimes to a single number (say, the White House). This overwhelms the operators and sometimes even the switchboard. Not the best result if you’re really trying to have your voice heard.

When setting up your next mobile messaging campaign, it’s important to think about the action you’re trying to get people to do. For some use-cases, such as generating phone calls, it makes sense to throttle your messages and slow things down. Maybe by a few hours, or maybe even over the course of a few days. Remember to keep in mind local business hours and time zone differences. When you use Message Throttling, customers get all the benefits of combining SMS and voice applications: high response rates, quantifiable results and analysis, and real-time legislative lookup, without the overwhelming spike of calls in the beginning.