Future of SMS Marketing

It’s a surprising fact but SMS traffic is expected to grow continuously over the next five years. Remember the beginning of 2000? When you’re not busy playing Snake on your 3310 Nokia, you are sending a text message to your friends for less than a pound per message. Those were the good times. 

Fast forward to this year and many customers use free services like WhatsApp, Viber or IMessage that only requires a stable internet connection and there are already many other communication platform to choose from e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, emails etc but despite all of this, the SMS industry is still going strong and is expected to continue its growth for the next succeeding years. 

One can argue that the reason for the SMS industry’s progressive growth is that it provides an extremely effective communication tool. The growth can also be attributed to the developing countries. We will continue to see substantial growth in mobile subscriptions and consequently an increase in SMS traffic. Businesses around the globe are using SMS to communicate with their customers. They are acquiring services from different OTP SMS providers. For example, the financial services and insurance companies have implemented SMS to a broad number for notifications, verification as well as one-time pins or OTP and different OTP providers offer those kinds of services. 

IOT or internet of things devices are becoming more popular and many of these use SMS technology due to high coverage, reliability and high deliverability. IOT devices can use SMS to do anything from delivering notifications on changes in server status to providing continuous information from a series of sensors both home and in the workplace such as power sensors, water sensors, humidity and temperature. 

We have learned that SMS traffic will still continue to increase and which sectors are leading the way to this success and that is because

• 98% of the people read SMS within the end of the day. Mostly within a few seconds after they received it. 

• There are 74% reports that they have zero unread SMS in their inbox. 

• SMS is an extremely cost effective communication platform

• The engagement rate of SMS is six to eight times higher than the engagement rate for email marketing.

• Most of the consumers don’t mind receiving SMS messages from different brands. 

• 9 out of 10 customers who enroll in an SMS loyalty program reports that they benefit from their participation. 

• SMS has no reliance on internet connectivity and can reach large parts of the world. People don’t need to be connected to the internet to receive different SMS promotions from their favorite store. 

• Almost 5 billion in the world can send and receive SMS messages accounting to over 2/3 of the world’s population and this number is still expected to grow for the next few years. 

The SMS industry will likely to continue having impressive numbers both in terms of performance and traffic in the coming years. You may need to consider whether your business or organization could benefit from further implementing SMS technology right now.