The role of SMS as mobile marketing comes of age

We’re getting to the point in the year when business and technology experts are looking ahead to 2011 and what it will bring – what are going to be the best strategies to pursue and the trends that will need to handled or exploited?

Right now, a very common theme in these discussions is how 2011 is going to be the year when mobile computing – and, by extension, mobile marketing – really “comes of age”. During 2009 and 2010, the large scale adoption of smartphones by the consumer market has solved many of the problems that had previously plagued mobile, such as small screens and relative lack of interactivity. In fact, because of the rise of apps, mobile has very quickly become a force that is actually shaping the way the online world works and how companies are using technology to reach their consumers.

So mobile is settling down to become a standard part of the technology landscape and an essential part of the marketing mix. What does this mean for SMS?

In considering that question, we have to think about the major benefits of SMS as a communication form. It is:

1. Fast
2. Cost-effective
3. Easy to use
4. Direct

We also need to think about how it compares with the other main mobile communications technology – mobile email – in each of those areas:

1. SMS is as fast, or faster than email. Because SMS messages are distributed via commercial comms networks they don’t have to rely on large numbers of third-party, intermediate servers that can slow down, delay or just plain lose messages. SMS is also faster and simpler to create than email: recipients only expect (and, indeed, only want) short messages, which isn’t always the case with email.

2. You might think that SMS will always lose out to mobile email in terms of price. But that’s not necessarily true: for someone away from their home country, for example, sending and receiving SMS might be cheaper than dealing with emails on a data roaming tariff. Additionally, there’s the concept of getting what you pay for: mobile email might be superficially “free”, but it eats into data allowances, takes longer to send and receive and suffers from a lower degree of reliability than SMS. There is a slightly greater up-front cost for SMS, but in many situations – especially where mobile marketing is involved – its increased reliability is well worth the (highly marginal) extra cost and actually represents better value for money than email.

3. On smartphones, SMS and email ease of use is about the same. But what about people using standard mobiles? For them, it’s much easier to receive and send SMS than email.

4. Both SMS and email are direct in a mobile context in that they go straight to the device in the recipient’s pocket or bag. But even users with push email alerts set up on their phones are more likely to pay immediate attention to an SMS alert, simply because text messages are less common, and likely to be more personal, than email messages.

With that it mind, it seems likely that SMS is going to not only remain a key technology, but actually increase in importance as mobile marketing becomes part of the mainstream. In particular, the rise of the mobile app seems to be driving an increased use of automated messaging for marketing purposes – something TextMagic customers are well placed to exploit with our bulk SMS gateway API.