Good news from a recent MMA study: the growth of mobile marketing keeps coming. In Q3’08, there were 267 million mobiles phone users in the US, and more than 160 million of those subscribers used SMS messaging.

Why does this matter to small businesses?  Their customers have mobile phones—lots of them. (Yes, this is stating the obvious.) And they have their phones with them pretty much all of the time.  So rather than trying to reach them via a paper coupon in a mass mailer or even an email that requires the customer to be sitting at their computer, a business can send an SMS message that gets to the customers who have opted into their mobile list immediately.  And these messages are read quickly, too–generally in about 15 minutes.