The Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging market is both vast and varied. Nothing stays the same for long and the only REAL barometer of how the industry is truly doing surely can be through speaking to the people whose lives we are attempting to impact – subscribers, consumers – and asking them?
Well, this is what we have continued to do here at MEF, year after year. On behalf of MEF, On Device Research surveyed 8,450 smartphone users, 650 in each of 13 markets. Volumes of A2P transactions are increasing rapidly around the world, driven to a large degree by the level of tangible digital transformation that is going on all around us. E-commerce is moving on in leaps and bounds and no matter the organisation, all need to place special effort on building and cementing loyalty with their customers. Getting to the stage where your clients remain loyal and come back time and again to you is not always easy. This is where having a multitude of great mobile digital channels at your finger-tips comes in very handy.
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In general, businesses messaging is bigger than ever with an increase in users who received messages from businesses across every channel. The biggest winners are SMS with a 2% and WhatsApp with a 3% increase.
Reports of spam are growing at a faster rate than the amount of people who reported receiving business messaging. 42% of people globally say they receive annoying spam messages from companies they have never contacted before
Like last year, China and Brazil lead in the amount of people who received business messaging. A whopping 96% of users in Brazil and 97% in China received commercial messages. This is an increase from last year and the highest record this survey has seen. 95% of users in France received a business message.
In P2P, email usage has plateaued while SMS and OTT continue to grow rapidly. Yet in terms of A2P, email is the channel most reported to send business messages (increasing to 50% of those we asked). However, if we combine OTT and SMS, mobile messaging is still the de facto leader.
Historically, we’ve seen younger demos receive less A2P messages from enterprises but this year the divide between younger and older is shrinking. 37% of consumers aged 25-34 reported receiving A2P SMS.
Despite concern for fraud on the rise, globally we saw incidents of fraud actually decrease from 36% to 35% this year.
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