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The 3 Waves of 1:1 Messaging Software Learn how 1:1 messaging has evolved and why marketers need to adapt
The 3 Waves of 1:1 Messaging SoftwareLearn how 1:1 messaging has evolved and why marketers need to adapt
The First Wave
The year was 1997, and approximately half of U.S. households with internet access were getting it via dial-up service provider America Online (AOL).
Remember this?
Meanwhile, 100% of the kids living in those households were slowly but surely becoming addicted to AOL's new, proprietary messaging program, Instant Messenger.
Launched in May of 1997, AIM was part of the first wave of messaging software that would revolutionize 1:1 communication in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
The 3 Waves of 1:1 Messaging Software
The first wave of messaging introduced the world to the “user definable online co-user list” (aka the buddy list), which made it easier to communicate with multiple people 1:1.
For example, instead of having to make 5 individual phone calls in order to talk to 5 friends, with AIM you could scan your buddy list once to see who was available, and then rattle of messages accordingly.
Talking to 5 friends before instant messaging
Talking to 5 friends after instant messaging
But AIM and its counterparts weren’t without their limitations. One of the big ones was mobility: You could only use these messaging programs on a computer. And back in the late ’90s that usually meant a shared family computer.
So when cell phones and Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging started gaining traction, first-wave messaging programs were at a major disadvantage.
The Second Wave
In 2000, the first year the Pew Research Center measured cell phone ownership, 53% of U.S. adults were shown to own cell phones. Five years later, that figure had grown to 73%.
By 2005, there were 36 million monthly active SMS texters in the U.S.
The main downside of SMS? Its cost. Cellular service providers typically charge a fee based on the amount of SMS messages you send and receive. (Fast forward to today, and that cost issue has started catching up with SMS. Revenues from SMS as well as overall SMS usage are in decline.)
In the early/mid-2000s, a few companies cropped up to challenge SMS, and these companies formed a distinct second wave of messaging software.
During this wave, Skype, Blackberry, and Google all seized on the opportunity to deliver more affordable 1:1 messaging at scale. (As you’ll see on the next slide, they had varying degrees of success.)
The 3 Waves of 1:1 Messaging Software: Growth
While you can think of the second wave of 1:1 messaging software as knocking on SMS’s door, the third wave of 1:1 messaging software is now actively breaking that door down.
The Third Wave
And, in a great example of history being cyclical, one of the driving forces behind this third wave of messaging software was, once again, an evolution in cell phone technology.
This time, it was smartphones, which had their first big showing in the U.S. with the release of the iPhone in 2007.
By 2011, 35% of U.S. adults owned a smartphone. By 2012, it was 45%, and by 2013, 56%. And yes, that percentage is still climbing. (It’s up past 68% now.)
Smartphones offered a universally simple way to avoid the cost pitfalls of SMS text messaging, while simultaneously allowing for additional features and functionality to be brought into the world of 1:1 messaging: apps.
Recognizing the potential of messaging apps for smartphones, companies began entering the space in droves in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
Today, 6 of the top 10 most used apps in the world are messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, Viber, KakaoTalk, and WeChat).
When we look at the number of monthly active users these third-wave messaging apps are attracting, and then look at the peak numbers those earlier players were able to yield, there’s really no comparison …
The 3 Waves of 1:1 Messaging Software: Peak Active Users
Today’s messaging software landscape is exponentially larger than it once was. There aren’t just more companies, there are billions more users.
By the end of this year, eMarketer predicts that nearly half of smartphone users — 49.3% to be precise — will be using messaging apps. By 2019, it will be 65%.
As marketers, the sheer number of people flocking to messaging apps should be enough to get our attention.
After all, in order to truly understand our customers, we need to be hanging out where they're hanging out and using the tools that they're using.
But what makes messaging apps even more intriguing are the commerce, customer support, and advertising ecosystems developing around them.
Last year, for example, Snapchat partnered with Square on an in-app payment system called Snapcash.
Fashion brand Everlane, meanwhile, started using Facebook Messenger for sharing order details and fielding customer questions.
Clearly, today’s messaging apps are about more than simply sending messages. To quote HubSpot VP of Marketing Meghan Anderson:
“If you think of messaging apps as just another form of text messaging, you may be missing the larger picture … We've named WhatsApp and the like ‘messaging apps’ because that's our current context for them. They send messages. But what if the larger story behind messaging apps is not that they remove barriers to sending messages, but rather that they remove barriers to all digital interactions and transactions.”
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Messaging is the next big thing that businesses will need to understand in order to grow — and this is exactly what we're focused on at Drift: Helping businesses have 1:1 conversations with their prospects and customers at scale.
