With a decade all wrapped up, we look forward to the twenties as a decade of huge technological progress. Check out what we think will be happening in 2020 in the world of mobile and digital with a few predictions and thoughts below.
Cyber Security
2019 saw some very high profile data breaches in the mobile and digital world including the popular Fortnite game in January, Facebook in April, graphic design software Canva in May, Capital One Bank in July. Furthermore, consumer awareness of data protection and privacy are on the rise following the investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal, reverberations of GDPR implementation and even the ongoing discussions around the privacy of smart home speakers.
Cybersecurity is touted to be one of the most important technological trends coming into the new decade. With it, technologies like multi-factor authentication increasingly become the standard for small and large businesses alike. Secure your business systems using two (or more) factor authentication; where you use a combination of knowledge, possession or inherent factors to verify user identity. Or more simply, a factor that users know, something that they have and something they are. SMS is one of the easiest possession factors to use, as most people have a mobile handset and using an SMS gateway like ClickSend, you can set and forget your SMS authentication system.
Furthermore, with users being expected to remember multiple different passwords, the demand for single-use passwords or alternative login methods is on the increase. One of the most popular ways to log into accounts when you forget your password is to receive an SMS to your mobile device. Again, this is something that is easily automated through your SMS platform.
IoT
IoT, or the Internet of Things, refers to everyday objects that have been given internet capability. 2019 saw a huge uptake of smart speakers like the Google Home, Amazon Echo, Apple HomePods or third party speakers with Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri enabled. As these smart home ecosystems improve and grow in complexity, we expect business use cases for the internet of things to grow in a similar way.
Coming into the ‘20s we expect to see smart devices become more sophisticated and feature-rich. With the improvements made to data connections (and the rollout of the 5G network), data capabilities will improve significantly in the coming years and be able to accommodate exponentially greater data transfer. We will also then start to see new ways to trigger text messages from smart devices. Currently, we are seeing the uptake of people using smart home devices to control home temperatures, alarms, doorbells, etc.
In business cases, there are endless possibilities for smart devices to aid productivity. For example, there are many applications for manufacturing, logistics and transport. Control temperature, pressure or fuel level with sensors integrated with SMS to send messages when levels reach a particular threshold. In the banking and finance industry, receive automated text messaging whenever stocks, investments or interest rates dip above or below a particular amount. In the medical industry, have automated messaging whenever a patient’s blood pressure or heart rate exceeds or dips below healthy levels. Or in the automotive industry, forget the grandiose propositions from Elon Musk, simple but useful integrations like messaging when a headlight blows, brake pads are wearing out, servicing is required or even a reminder to refuel can add peace of mind to drivers.
Marketing Automation and Machine Learning
One of the big advances in this area is just how even more accessible marketing automation software will become. You will see more traditional email marketing software vendors ‘re-brand’ to marketing automation. Just like MailChimp did in 2018.
Mailchimp started out as an email marketing company, but we’ve expanded beyond email and become a leading marketing platform for small businesses.
Marketing automation software will become more sophisticated and omnichannel moving beyond just email to a multi-channel, multi-device approach. Marketing, selling and serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out. It will span all aspects of mobile and digital.
Machines are becoming better able to understand humans through patterns and build up knowledge that marketers are able to offer suggestions of similar products that customers may like, automated through machine learning. This is only one of the effective marketing automations that has been possible due to automation and machine learning. Similarly, the uptake of automated marketing communications should ramp up in 2020, allowing marketers to send personalised text messages quickly and efficiently. These efficiencies through automation will then allow small marketing teams to market smarter and compete with large corporations with bigger marketing teams.
RCS
We’ve been saying it for more than a year, RCS is going to be huge. Created as the successor to the humble SMS, in response to other rich messaging platforms like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, the rollout of the rich communications service (RCS) is going to change the way we send text-based messages.
At the beginning of last year, we expected 2019 to be the year of RCS, however, it seems that the expansion of RCS has been a little slower than anticipated with Google’s RCS platform ‘Chat’ only just being rolled out to Android handsets in the US last month. The good news here is that we expect RCS to gain greater traction this year.
We did a great guide on all things RCS in 2019. You can directly download it here.
With ClickSend at the forefront of messaging technology, you can be sure we will have your rich messaging needs covered in 2020 and beyond.
Bring on the next decade! In the meantime, let us know your thoughts on mobile and digital.
