The Ofcom Report

The Ofcom Report

2 minute read

Aug 8, 2018

The Ofcom Narrative Report was released last week and made for some interesting reading! This is a free to read document and can be found on the Ofcom website here.

We’re going to outline a few statistics and pieces of information from the telecommunications and networks section of the report and comment on what they might mean for the sector as a whole and how you could take advantage of these growing trends and expand your business.

The first statistic that caught our eye was:

“The most popular online activity for commuters was sending and receiving text messages/ instant messages, with 43% saying they did this.”

Obviously this is for commuters who aren’t driving their own vehicles, but it does show that during commuting most people are on their phones. Let’s say on average the usual time for commuting is between 7-9am and 4-6pm those are prime times to send out your SMS campaigns, as most people won’t be on their phone all day at work and will probably be doing other things when they get home after work. So these 4-5 hours at the start and end of the working day would be perfect for getting out your traffic.

“TouchPoints research, which shows that the average mobile phone user spent 2 hours 49 minutes per day using their mobile phone in 2017, a 24% increase since 2015.”

This statistic is likely to only grow as dependency on mobile devices increases, people are never far away from their phones. The consequences of this are pretty clear cut!

“Analysis of data collected by Ofcom’s Consumer Mobile Experience research74 shows

that, on average, Android users taking part in the research had a total of 81 screen-on or app sessions per day during the Q4 2017 measurement period. If panellists slept for eight hours a day, this suggests that they checked or used their smartphone on average every 12 minutes while they were awake.”

The key part of this statistic is that last sentence, checking your phone approximately every 12 minutes, this means that an SMS message will usually reach a customer within 12 minutes, or sooner, after sending. This beats the reach time of Email, TV and Radio by a huge margin.

SMS marketing is easily the most effective form of digital communication out there!

 

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