Phones by the bedside

In our post last Friday we had a quick look at Pew Internet’s new report on cell phone use among US adults.

One particularly interesting revelation in the report is that around 65% of adults have their phones beside them while they sleep. This has big implications if you’re a business or organisation involved in permission-based texting of your customers or members: if you send them an SMS in the middle of the night, it will probably be the very first message they read when they wake up in the morning.

Let’s consider some of the potential benefits of early-bird texting:

1. You can tie in with products or services (yours or your competitors’) that were featured on TV the previous evening.

2. Your message will reach your recipients at a relatively quiet time of day – their defences will be down and they are likely to give you a little more “eyeball time” than if they were having to snatch a quick glance at your message in the middle of a busy day.

3. Most of your recipients will be at home. So, for example, if you want them to go online and do something they will be near their personal computers – and may have a little time over breakfast to check out the link or offer you are promoting.

Of course, the results you get are going to depend on your product, goal and customer and/or membership base. The Pew statistics are broken down by age, ethnicity, education, income and location (urban vs. rural). Perhaps unsurprisingly, younger phone users are more likely to sleep with their devices next to them than older users, though the practice doesn’t drop off as sharply with age as you might think. 90%+ of people in their late teens and twenties sleep with their phones; the figure for 30-49 year olds is 70%+, for 50-64 year olds 50%+ and is still a healthy 34%+ for individuals aged 65 or over.

The stats are pretty much flat across educational levels (67%, 63%, 66% and 67% respectively among individuals with less than a high school education, a high school diploma, a college degree and a postgraduate or professional degree), but there is quite a high variation among ethnic groups. You are more likely to sleep with your phone next to you if you are a non-hispanic black (78%) or an English-speaking hispanic (75%) than if you are non-hispanic white (62%+).

If you’re interested in SMS marketing, it’s well worth having a look at the full report to see how it fits your target demographic. Bear in mind that the survey is of US adults only. However, as I said in the last post, since mobile/SMS take-up has historically been slightly slower in the US than in other developed countries, these statistics could cautiously be read as a conservative estimate of habits among European/East Asian users.

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