Text SOS IPLING to 99123

2013 brings lower SMS rates to our clients!

iPling's philosophy consists in giving its clients not only the most user friendly SMS platform, but also to pass along any price discounts it negotiates with its carrier partners.  We are proud to announce that, beginning this February, we will be discounting our bulk SMS prices by roughly 50%, and the higher your monthly volume commitment, the more savings you can generate.

If you are thinking on ways to complement your outbound marketing campaigns or your internal corporate communications, we invite you to consider iPling's SMS platform. We've been the simplest and fastest way to get the word out for some time now, and now we are also one of the most price competitive.

To get started, send us an email to info@ipling.com or call us toll free within the U.S. at 1(866)637.9995 or from Mexico at 01(800)838.6018.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Happy Holidays!

The iPling crew wishes you happy holidays and all the best for 2013! Let's make it a year to remember!

Is Texting Mangling the English Language?

Do your OMGs and LOLs have you sometimes srsly forgetting how to write in proper English? If so, you may not be alone.

Texting is on the rise, and changing the ways people interact with language. For some high schoolers today, abbreviations like those above have likely been a part of their vocabulary since they learned to write a five-paragraph essay. So just how embedded in formal communications could texting slang become?

While that remains to be seen, there’s no doubting the impact it’s had so far. The Internet education portal OnlineSchools.com recently took a look at the trend and came up with some interesting findings via sources including the British Journal of Psychology, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and PBS.

Among the more interesting tidbits they report: An estimated 8 trillion text messages were sent in 2011, and 95% of cellphone owners between the ages of 18 and 29 send texts. A 17-year-old in Wisconsin even took home $50,000 this year for flawlessly typing a 149-character message in just 39 seconds. Several texting terms have made their way into the hallowed Oxford English Dictionary, and with good reason — 97% of 18- to 24-year-olds who own a cellphone text daily.

But before you get angry, and blame new-fangled technology for destroying our language, consider this: British politician Winston Churchill reportedly received the first OMG in an old-fashioned letter way back in 1917.

For more, check out the full OnlineSchools infographic at http://www.onlineschools.com/in-focus/text-talk. Then, let us know in the comments: Do you think text messaging is bad for the English language, or are its effects negligible?

SMS vs. Twitter (yes, they can happily coexist)

Vibes put out the following infographic comparing SMS to Twitter marketing. As you could expect, when looking at global reach there is really no comparison, SMS wins by a mile. The two channels however can (and should) complement each other. At iPling we look forward to helping you find the right mix of SMS messages and Tweets, based on your products, services and target markets. Get in touch!

Mexico continues to lead the Latin American SMS market

According to iPling's friends over at RCR Wireless News, Mexico has the largest short message service market in Latin America and is the second largest mobile market in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Acision Mobile Value Added Service Monitor reports value added services sales in Mexico increased by 38% in the third quarter of 2011, generating just over $1 billion and accounting for 31% of all mobile operators’ service sales there.

Of the total of VAS sales, 57% were generated from SMS and multimedia messaging services, totaling $601 million in sales in the third quarter of 2011 and up 32% year-over-year. Almost all of the users MAVAM polled (98%) used SMS (up 3% from Q1 2011), with 59% sending more than one text message a day. This from a survey of SMS, MMS and instant messaging use during the fourth quarter of last year.

Mexico’s wireless telecommunications sector is dominated by América Móvil’s Telcel, which controls about 75% of the market. The domination by a single carrier has pushed government regulators to implement plans to improve the competitive landscape, though the efforts have so far seen few results.

The market still has plenty of room to grow, but mobile operators and government agencies must find ways to make the sector increasingly competitive. Paradoxically, Mexico's SMS rates remain among the highest in the world.

A cute little video on SMS marketing... enjoy ;)

Mobile marketing campaign? SMS is the way to go!

Rapid advancements in mobile technology have opened up all sorts of marketing options in the mobile world. Some examples of these are mobile apps, in-game advertising and dedicated mobile web pages to name a few. While it may appear to some that SMS marketing is loosing some momentum, research from iPling and Frost & Sullivan confirms that SMS is still a brilliant tool for marketing and remains the most universal mobile medium to date.

SMS enables you to send marketing communications to practically any phone unlike with mobile apps, or use of the internet, where compatible software and data usage limits are key limiting factors. SMS marketing has far more potential reach amongst the 91% of adults who own/use a mobile phone in North America.

The open rates for SMS messages are amongst the highest across any form of marketing. Frost & Sullivan reports have found that compared to email marketing, which has an average open rate of 22%, the huge 98% open rate of SMS messages is even more impressive.

Another recent study found the click through rate (CTR) of URLs included in SMS messages is 19% which compares to a 4.2% CTR for emails. This demonstrates that SMS marketing is not only a more engaging marketing method, but it is also more likely to drive responses that companies deem desirable than with email marketing, which is also subject to strict spam filters, a problem that does not affect SMS marketing.

So, despite SMS messaging appearing now a days a very basic way to communicate in the mobile space, it remains a highly effective and engaging medium, with a massive potential reach!

Mobile payments in emerging markets? iPling and Gartner agree SMS is the way to go.

Research from Gartner says that this year will see more than $171.5 billion in mobile payment transactions — a rise of over 60 percent on 2011′s $105.9 billion — with 212.2 million people (up 32 percent from 160.5m in 2011) using some form of mobile payment service. And what’s fuelling the rise? Despite the rise of smartphones, it’s legacy-based services like SMS and web-based transactions.

Longer term, Gartner believes that transactions will reach a volume of $617 billion by 2016 — with average growth slightly slowing down to around 42 percent — with 448 million users using such services. SMS, Gartner research director Sandy Shen notes, remains the “dominant” access technology for making payments in developing markets.

Send JOIN JOSEFINA to 99123!

iPling is proud to announce that it was recently selected as the SMS platform for the campaign of Mexico's Josefina Vazquez Mota. Josefina is the presidential candidate of the ruling (PAN) party and has a strong chance of becoming Mexico's first female president. We wish her the best and look forward to supporting her campaign by sending SMS messages to hopefully millions of mexicans that have no other means of getting timely information delivered to them.

Here is a catchy jingle, in case you speak Spanish!

http://www.josefina.mx/videos.php?video=822

iPling's platform works seamlessly in the U.S. and Mexico. All you need is a basic cell phone capable of sending and receiving SMS messages (i.e. no smartphones or data plans needed). Just text JOIN JOSEFINA to 99123 and you'll begin getting the latest on her campaign. It's that easy!