Everyone has a mobile, don’t they? Well not quite, but not far off. Latest figures suggest that 56 per cent of mobile users own smartphones. They are completely changing the way we live, the way we work and the way we do business. On a number of projects over the last year we have discovered, not surprisingly, that mobile is becoming more and more important in the world of marketing – especially email marketing.

In fact we have written on this subject a number of times before. This time however, we have been on a fact hunt and we now have proof. To many of you, who know that mobiles are important, we are preaching to the converted. But similarly, many of you will also know that if you suggest a strategy you will need to justify your decisions. And I am sure you won’t be surprised to hear that not everyone, particulalry some of the senior decision makers, is as mobile savvy as you would have first thought.

So come on a fact hunt and you too can discover just how mobiles are ruling the world.

Just like with any facts, we first stumbled upon American figures:

Nielsen’s Social Media Report 2012, analysed American mobile use – and although these statistics no doubt indicate a worldwide trend, they are not the nuggets we need. You can see the key points here:

  1. Use of a mobile device to access the web is up 82 per cent on 2011 from 52.4m to 95.2m.
  2. Numbers of people using mobile apps is up 85 per cent on 2011 from 55m to 101.8m
  3. People are spending more time using mobile web – time spent is up 22 per cent on 2011.

For the full report click here.

Ofcom’s Communications Market Report 2012 – at last a UK report and there are several gems here. The report found that:

  1. UK consumers download a record 424 megabytes of data each per month on their smartphones and tablets. The figure is almost 60% more than a year ago.
  2. Much of the increase in use of mobile devices, especially smartphones, has been driven by the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, with 40% of UK adults accessing their profiles on the go.
  3. British 18–to 24-year-olds are proving to be the world’s top mobile social networkers, with 62% accessing their profiles from smartphones and tablets, a higher proportion than any of the countries analysed in the report.
  4. The smartphone has now become a must-have in the UK, with almost 60% of British mobile phone owners saying they have one, a jump from 46% in last year’s report.
  5. The British are among the most likely to make internet purchases from their mobile phones, with more than 23% having visited a retail website, the highest in Europe.

For the full report click here.

Experian gave us two gems, from leading technology company Gartner:

By 2015 Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, predicts that 80 per cent of all handsets sold in the UK will be smartphones.

The company also predicts that in 2013 smartphones will overtake PCs as the most common web access device.

For the full report click here.

The Direct Marketing Association gave us these two crowning treats:

  1. 56 per cent of mobile users own smartphones.
  2. 40 per cent of people say they use mobile search when looking for information about a brand.

For the full report click here.

We stumbled upon a write up of The Future of Mobile by GPMD. Speakers included David Dyson (CEO) of Three UK, Ian Carrington of Google, David Stewart fromOfcom, Nicholas Blades of Telefonica O2 and Paul Morris from Vodafone. Here is what the speakers had to say:

  1. The number of smartphone searchers doubles every two months
  2. Smartphone sales overtook PC sales last year
  3. 28% of internet usage is from a mobile phone
  4. 20% of all YouTube views are from a mobile device

For the full write up click here.