Mobile Messaging: A Game Changer

Mobile Messaging has been a trend for the past 10 years now. Almost everyone uses it day in day out, from an ordinary student to the high ranking officials/business men.

Our smartphones enable constant and instant communication with our family, friends, and work colleagues. However, the built-in options out of the box aren’t always the best. New messaging apps have appeared to provide rich services offering all kinds of interactions with others, from free text messaging, to voice and video calling, to photo and file sharing with the added benefit of encryption.

Mobile Messaging platforms have completely changed the way people consume mobile messaging, and with it, the kind of relationship they have with personal technology like their smartphones. But it’s also changed companies’ marketing habits.

Different mediums require different types of messages – email marketing calls for one style, in-app notifications another, and so on. Now that enterprises are catching on to the growth of messaging apps, they are using them as a marketing tool, and in doing so they’re replicating the P2P model of communication. Nowadays it’s not unusual to have messages from brands among messages from your friends and family.

This is a major shift not only in how brands communicate with consumers, but – crucially – how consumers communicate with brands. The beauty of messaging is that it’s two-way – while brands may still send some ‘Do not reply’ messages, usually customers can reply to ask questions, clarify details, change booking arrangements, and so on. Consumers now expect this – they want to engage with brands in a very different way. They’ve been kept on hold one too many times and prefer the ease and convenience of messaging instead. As a way of communicating, it’s native to how people use messaging for their own ends – they can talk to a brand just how they talk to their friends, family or colleagues. It’s a shift to what in America they call the direct to consumer (D2C) model. Effectively everything from prospection to sales to confirmation to delivery to post-sales is all done through messaging.