Spotlight on mBlox at CTIA

Around 95 per cent of all apps that are downloaded are only opened once, Michele Turner, chief marketing officer at mBlox, tells Mobile Marketing Magazine. "Most of the apps I have on my iPhone never ever communicate back with me," she says.

Push messaging and rich content give apps the ability to overcome those challenges and encourage greater engagement between consumers and brands. mBlox offers technology for mobile commerce, mobile marketing and mobile messaging. It has connections to more than 800 carriers around the world and it served 5bn application-to-person interactions in 2011. The company has also been moving into the direct carrier bill payments market, with direct connections in 14 countries to date.

When merchants have direct-carrier billing as an option for payment, conversion rates increase by 35 per cent, Turner says. "That kind of lift for merchants is huge right now."

On the messaging front, while there is plenty of talk about the "death of SMS," Turner counters that enterprise-to-person messaging is still growing strong. Push messaging is going to be a common way for enterprises to interact with consumers going forward, she says.

Text messages carry a different level of immediacy than virtually any other channel, she says, adding that about 75 per cent of all text messages are opened within 3 minutes of being received.

mBlox Engage is a a new cloud-based solution that gives marketers more tools to engage with consumers, manage their relationship and retrieve analytics about their targeted campaigns. Brands can trigger events like rich push messages by time, location or device status. Brands could push coupons to sports fans while they're inside a venue, for example, and only push content to them if their battery is above a certain level.

"I think brands are really struggling with this today," Turner says. "We're making it much easier to push relevant information."

Though mBlox plays in a few different sandboxes, she says the companies varied divisions are natural extensions of the mobile marketing industry. "We're really a mobile engagement company," Turner says. "You don't do mobile marketing without the payment and commerce part of it. It just goes hand in hand."