At the beginning of this month, we ran a “Then and Now” analysis of smartphone penetration in the USA. Well, a similar opportunity presented itself when I saw the most recent Forrester report, US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016. Take a look:

Let’s compare that to the previous projections from July of 2009:

Couple key takeaways here:

• Mobile has sunk its teeth in earlier than expected – and by a fair amount ($748M 09 projected for 2011 vs. $1,652M in 2011)
• For social media and email, the analyst was right on for 2011 (social: $1217 vs. $1590, email: $1504 vs. $1510, with tempered expectations going forward
• Forrester is bullish (like, Chilli bullish) on mobile marketing. The estimate for 2014 jumped by almost 4 billion dollars (compared to 300 million increase for social and 20 million decrease for email).
• Basically, the jump from 11% to 38% CAGR for mobile demonstrates convincingly that companies are investing heavily in mobile now and planning to do so in the future.

This bullishness probably has something to do with how powerful mobile phones are for consumers. A recent Pew Research study showed some staggering mobile phone usage rates including:

• An average of 12.3 mobile phone calls made per day
• An average of 41.5 texts sent/received per day
• 18-24 year olds send/receive roughly 3,200 texts per month on average
• 25% of 18-24 year olds send/receive more than 100 texts per day

Here’s the age group breakdown of average texts sent and received from Pew:

And their preferences for how they want to be contacted:

So what does this mean for companies? Well, first is that the mobile opportunity is huge and ripe for profit. Second is that mobile is just going to get bigger. As a result, identifying ways to develop mobile relationships with customers now becomes that much more important.