What is the Future of SMS Marketing?
Over the past two decades, SMS marketing has become so ingrained in our lives that we don’t even pause to consider what life was like without it. Despite that, marketers still don’t regard the platform as highly as email or social media marketing. What a mistake. Here is what the future of SMS marketing is all about.
Fundamental channels for digital marketing.
While email has long been a fundamental channel for digital marketing campaigns. The hype around social media marketing is well deserved, if only for its powerful targeting and personalization capabilities.
SMS marketing, on the other hand, offers equally valuable yet unsung benefits for marketing communications. If you’ve hesitated to adopt text messaging as a marketing channel, perhaps it’s the best time to reconsider.
Why It’s the Best Time to Adopt SMS Marketing
Although SMS is now considered as a powerful addition to an omnichannel strategy, it wasn’t always an attractive digital marketing platform. It was too expensive for marketers to take it seriously. Plus, it lacked any semblance of a playbook, which email already had.
Today’s digital landscape, however, has paved the way for text messaging to be a marketing platform that’s not just viable but actually worthwhile. In particular, these changes have driven its success as a medium for marketing:
Peak Mobile Penetration
The first SMS-ready mobile phone was introduced to the market in 1993. But, the rapid adoption of mobile phones came towards the late 90s as cellular networks became more stable and even allowed cross-network messaging.
By 2000, 12% of the world’s population had mobile phones, and that number has consistently increased since then.
Today, there are over five billion unique mobile subscribers worldwide. The stat means over 65% of people all over the world have a mobile device of some kind.
Although the number of smartphone users is increasing steadily, approximately 30% of mobile subscribers don’t have a smartphone with internet access. But, each one is capable of receiving text messages.