• by Ray Schultz , July 27, 2020

SMS messaging by marketers grew by 8.5% in March compared with February, and 20% in April, according to a study by cloud communications platform Infobip. 

The reason is that brands are looking for more timely ways than email to confirm pick-ups, share new hours of operation and provide other information, Infobip infers from the data. 

In addition, personalization is more of a priority among companies, exceeding the first-name tags in email. 

Overall communication volumes have changed in some sectors. Healthcare grew by 39% in March and 29% in April.

But there were 50% falloffs in the transportation, hospitality and travel sectors in April, although they appeared to begin recovering in June. 

The results are based on tracking by Infobip of clients across its communications platform, reaching 7 billion mobile devices.  

“Before the pandemic, many of our customers had plans to roll out their digital transformations over the next few years -- that quickly changed,” states Craig Charles Webster, head of marketing Americas for Infobip.