SMS Marketing Strategy And Service Has Evolved Over Time

It is hardly a decade when SMS, SMS marketing strategy and SMS service started its onward march and since then it has made a meteoric rise. Most industry experts predict that this rise of SMS messaging will continue in the recent and following years proving it to be the most important and effective tool for communication.

Therefore, considering the usefulness and effectiveness of SMS marketing, this new form of marketing has proved to be the best marketing strategy that has overtaken all other traditional forms due to its low cost messaging and instantly responsive feature.

There are some very impressive figures released by The Mobile Data Association recently. It shows that:

• The appetite for the medium rests undimmed with a staggering 12 to 16 million text messages sent and received every hour.
• The continuous growth of SMS messaging is even more highlighted by the 2009 daily average of 265 million text messages apart from another 1.6 million picture messages.
• The figure of total text messages grew to 96.8 billion and as for the picture messages it was over 600 million that were sent and received across the whole year.

The experts, however, agree to the fact that the growth of SMS marketing and bulk SMS service over the years is so high due to the use of smart handsets by the new generation. These gadgets are specially designed to make things easier and faster in terms of sending and receiving texts.

There is one more reason that has also affected the significant rise in SMS marketing. It is the increasing acceptance of the bundled tariffs that has eventually driven down the cost of messaging.

The excellent prospects

The reason why more and more businesses are taking n to bulk SMS is that the prospects are excellent. Going by the figures and facts of different research and studies, it is good news for mobile marketers who want to use bulks SMS in order to get their message across to their customers.

• As it is, SMS has always been a popular approach and therefore this happens to provide the businesses a lot of scopes to use this as a gateway for both a branding tool as well as a direct response tool.
• Another notable thing is that bulk SMS has the incredible ability to generate far more responsive in comparison to any other form of direct marketing channel.
• It is also a proven fact that SMS marketing strategy has never been ruined or ineffective due to spam which is a very common and significant issue as far as email marketing is concerned.
• Adding to the list of benefits is the fact that there are no set up fee and you as a marketer have to pay only for those messages that you send. In fact, the cost of the bulk SMS message is the lowest in the industry.

There has been a dramatic advancement in technology and its extensive use in SMS marketing has helped it to evolve over time.

However, the medium of SMS still remains the same throughout. As a result of the revolution in the technology, it has enabled the software engineers to build newer and better communication channels that the marketers can use to reach out to their potential customers faster and in a better manner. This may have proved to be a boon for the customers as they can choose one of the different communication channels, this has only been able to create an impression on the customer base only as the prevalent marketing channel still happens to be SMS.

If you are wondering why to use SMS when you have an armada of several other useful options available then be informed that there are lots of reasons for it. In fact, SMS is the most effective wide-reach communication channel through SMS by itself is considered to be an old-school approach in marketing especially in these times when Social media reigns supreme.

There are a few impressive statistics that will substantiate the fact that SMS is still been used widely as the most effective communication channel. These are:

• As per several types of research, the open rate of SMS is incredibly high at 98% as compared to 30% of email marketing. This means almost every message sent to a customer is read by them on receipt.
• It is also found that the message is properly communicated as it successfully reaches the target audience which is not possible in any other media and provides such a high open rate as well.
• In addition to that, it is found that more than 83% of the SMS are opened within 3 minutes of its delivery.

All these facts and figures support the fact that the SMS channel is the most effective way to approach especially when you want to get results for your communication within a very short given time frame. Therefore, there is no other alternative to SMS if you want to communicate information immediately to your customers.

Tips to make it better

The most significant fact about SMS marketing is that you can send SMS to any kind of mobile phone and get the same result whether it is a basic handset, or a smartphone or even a handset in which internet is not enabled. However, to make your reach even wider and better and ensure that you reach to your target audience at remote areas faster through this channel where other channels fail to reach here are a few tips to follow:

• Increase the use of innovative technologies such as API or Application Programming Interfaces that will facilitate in mass recipients due to automation.
• Make sure that you send a URL to a large number of people using the API but make sure that the URL is long enough to fit in within the 160 character limit on SMS.
• Focus on secured logins through 2FA or Two Factor Authentication where an OTP or One Time Password will ensure the security of online user accounts on any platforms.

All this will ensure that your content is innovative, optimally functional and effective in this evergreen channel for marketing and customer communication.