Sometimes, talking about the multitude of uses for SMS within these blog posts is reminiscent to Bubba’s repeated variations of Prawns in the film, “Forrest Gump”. But it is necessary, as the depth of functionality and effectiveness of text messages, whether it be for marketing purposes, machine to machine communication, internal corporate communication, server alerts or simply informing people of general news is expansive, and extremely inexpensive to reach a mass audience (your customers). Go2mobile has been developing text messaging based solutions since 1998; gradually adapting and innovating SMS when market conditions justified. Since that period, text messaging traffic has exploded (statistics). Now, while updated reports all indicate that consumer based messaging (especially amongst teenagers sending to teenagers) is decreasing with the advent of Instant Messaging, SMS is still considered a premier marketing tool for businesses due to a number of factors, including:
- The reach of text messages; messages can be accepted and thus read on the majority of phones regardless of year vintage, software type and model range.
- Coverage; text messages can be received and delivered in the majority of countries with internal feedback on delivery notifications.
- Independence: SMS can be read on the majority of phone systems without any special software, where as the likes of instant messaging (IM) types of data need to be currently read on specifically installed apps. With SMS, you can send from an Android based phone to an iPhone or Nokia Lumia, and not be worried about the successful delivery. However, with IM, your customer needs a similar software application installed to read a message sent from the app that that your business is using.
- Group messaging to thousands of mobiles, complete with real-time status notifications, is more convenient and accessible to use for businesses.
- Age demographics: SMS usage statistics prove a wide range of age demographics can understand text messaging functionality.
- Statistics prove that text messages are, in the majority, opened immediately.
- Text messages can be sent from a corporate based email service or CRM based system without any special software, whereas other communication technologies cannot so easily do so without configuration.
- Entertainment type environments, such as radio chat shows, still require and rely on SMS for feedback, play requests, interaction and so forth (which also includes teenagers who are using SMS less to correspond within their own groups, but use SMS to correspond with such media).
Using Text Messages/SMS/Mobile Marketing in Business 