Introducing the 2019 Mobile Usage Report: How Consumers Are REALLY Texting

You’ve heard it before — the immediacy and high engagement rates of text marketing blow most other forms of digital marketing out of the water. Yet most of the statistics that the industry uses are about five years old. User behavior can change a lot over the course of five years, so we set forth to examine how mobile usage and texting habits have evolved. It turns out that our lives have become even more closely intertwined with everything mobile.

In fact, mobile phone usage is so habitual nearly 90% of our survey respondents admit to checking their phones within 30 minutes of waking up. And even as our device screens have become more cluttered with must-have apps, when it comes to sending and receiving text messages the majority of people still rely heavily on the native SMS app that comes pre-installed on their phones.

Even more surprising, our survey of over 1,000 people across ages 18-64+ found that texting is most cellphone users’ #1 activity, approximately equal to the amount of time they spend browsing the internet on their phones. 

While we’ve historically quoted a 98% open rate for text messages, our recent research, published in our 2019 Mobile Usage Report, revealed an astounding response rate for text messages: 90% of people respond within 30 minutes. And the immediacy rates back up this impressive text marketing stat: 70% of people check a new text message within five minutes.

Compare that to email marketing’s 2019 average open rate of 17%, and it will be hard to argue that texting shouldn’t be a part of your marketing mix. We collected all of these findings and more in our inaugural report, available to download for free. Be sure to get your copy today.