Valentine's Day the 3rd largest retail holiday - 1.06 billion text messages sent February 14, 2009

1bn text messages to be sent on Valentine's Day

Redwood City, CA - Businesses - both large and small - looking to reach customers effectively for Valentine's Day are turning to the ubiquity of SMS marketing on the mobile phone. Providing ideas and guidance to deploy, manage and track the success of SMS marketing programs, Clickatell published another guide in its successful series, which can be downloaded today at 2010 Valentine's Mobile Marketing Handbook.

Valentine's Day takes a larger share of shoppers' wallets than any other holiday season, third to Christmas and back-to-school. Based on the National Retail Federation's (NRF) this year's Valentine's Day survey, the average consumer will spend $103.00 on traditional Valentine's Day merchandise, up from $102.50 in 2009. NRF also predicts that US consumers will spend a total of $14.1 billion on Cupid's holiday this year.

Last year, with more than 1.06 billion messages sent on Valentine's Day, SMS continues to play a major role in how the world communicates and transacts in many ways. Given the popularity of SMS, especially on large spending holidays, retailers are finding clever ways to reach customers to drive revenue, using SMS marketing, which can be easily implemented, via Clickatell applications or APIs.

With more than 4 billion mobile phones already equipped with SMS, the growth of SMS has been astounding. Portio Research, a leading firm covering the mobile messaging market, issued its first messaging report in 2010 noting that, "SMS continues to confound expectations as Worldwide Messaging Revenues set to exceed USD $233 billion by 2014." Smart marketers around the world are incorporating SMS marketing as a wide reaching communications channel as part of their complete marketing mix, augmenting existing channels like direct mail, email, printed coupons and others. Another recent study by Dialogue Communications reported that 67% of mobile users would like to receive text alerts for everything from medical appointments to bill payments.

"This Valentine's season, the most popular forms of social media, SMS and Facebook, will help retailers generate more awareness and buzz about brands, products, services, and special offers instantly and effectively," said Pieter de Villiers, Clickatell CEO. "Retail offers can be delivered to more than 4 billion consumers via SMS, including more than 500 million Facebook users instantaneously, making it that much easier and natural for offers to be passed along virally. Never before has it been so easy and effective to reach billions with relevant, targeted, permission-based offers," he concluded.