What a Waste: "The call to action is an inbound text message, which generates a WAP Push message to sign people up to the service. An amazing 75% never respond to the WAP Push."

This is a big problem for the industry. I posted a comment on Mobhappy which sums up our experience of this:

"75% sounds way too high.

We’ve seen roughly 40% wastage on services. As you might expect, this %age increases for services which are promoted to the “mass market” (e.g. in the national press), and drops when you promote to audiences more attuned to mobile data usage (e.g. youth).

Explanations we’ve seen (and heard from follow-up research which a client conducted to look into this issue) include:

- WAP push message not arriving (lost in the network)
- Message arriving but going into separate “service inbox” rather than the general messaging inbox
- Handsets blocking WAP push completely (e.g. MS Smartphone)
- Users getting cold feet when seeing a service message, URL, etc.
- Users getting cold feet when being asked if they want to go online (mainly from not being sure how much it’ll cost them)
- Handsets not being configured for internet access (this is the most common explanation)"

The good news? Once a user has successfully downloaded content once, we see this drop-off rate decrease massively (from 40% to 10% or thereabouts). And it looks as though this drop-off is decreasing slowly over time, as folks get handsets which actually *work*, and more comfortable downloading mobile content.

Comments

[Mr Ribot]

I think this could also be due to a number of other factors:

The WAP push is normally the final step before the real transaction is started and should indicate the cost of the service / application the user is requesting. The user may not have previously known the cost or may second question themselves as to if they wish to spend money on the requested service.

WAP push messages are quite strictly limited in length and often appear quite harsh in terms of content, but on the other hand gets straight to the point. They can be made more friendly by having a "WAP Service message name" e.g. "Future Platforms" rather than coming from a number e.g. 83010.

That said, I think that a combination of incorrect internet settings , service inboxes and previous exprerience of mass mailed WAP Push marketing campaigns will probably have had a larger detrimental effect.

It increases the cost, but what about sending out an SMS as well as the WAP Push?