UrBC, Yekaterinburg, January 31, 2019. Ural companies have sent their customers more than eighteen million ‘smart’ texts with MegaFon.Target over the last two years, MegaFon’s press service reports.

‘According to Deloitte’s recent survey findings, text messages are now 39% less popular in Russia. The Urals’ business community, however, goes against the national trend in that local companies keep sending increasingly more texts through targeted messaging services. The number of local businesses that started using smart text messaging increased by 1.5 times in the last twelve months,’ the press service says.

The overall number of age-, gender-, location-, and online behavior-specific texts a business sends out on average rose by 66% in the last year. Every one in eight text messages a local company sends to customers relies on targeting technologies. In the Urals, November and December proved the most ‘popular’ targeted text messaging months.

‘Local businesses have sent out more than 18m smart text messages with MegaFon.Target in the last two years. The targeting solutions proved particularly popular with small and medium enterprises that see smart texts as an advertising medium. Attracting a thousand new customers within a stone’s throw of your office without even setting your foot out of that office is absolutely a possibility. All you have to do is look into your target audience’s preferences and set specific parameters. Smart texts informing potential customers of special offers and discounts are much more efficient and don’t look like spamming,’ says MegaFon Ural’s Corporates Development Director Inna Smirnova.

According to MegaFon’s analysts, Sverdlovsk Region-based businesses rely on smart text messaging more than other Russian companies. Every one in three smart texts get sent out by these businesses; companies operating in Chelyabinsk Region, Khanty-Mansiysky Autonomous Region/Yugra, and Tyumen Region come next in this rating.