Valentine's Day, third largest retail holiday - predicted $14.1bn to be spent in US; 1.06bn text messages sent 14 February 2009

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 programmes, Clickatell published another guide in its successful series, called the 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 this year's National Retail Federation's (NRF) Valentine's Day survey, the average consumer will spend $103 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, recently noted: "SMS continues to confound expectations as Worldwide Messaging Revenue is set to exceed USD$233 billion by 2014." 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 payment. 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, e-mail, printed coupons and others.

"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, opt-in based offers," he concluded.