SMS has become an important medium of broadcasting messages and enhancing communication between the company and the consumer. Apart from using social media and digital marketing routes for propagating their business, the use of cellular bandwidth as means of promotion is an innovative idea. People may let the promotional messages enter the spam folder, but text messages are rarely ignored. The use of business promotional messages aids the company in promotion during festivals and special occasions. These messages are managed by the messaging center that is a part of the marketing section of the company office, and routinely regulate the content of the messages before broadcasting them to consumers.
It had been observed that while using search engine optimization to make websites and blogs attractive to consumers, there was one channel that was left unobserved in the midst of stringent competition. This channel included the SMS route. Today applications for sending bulk messages have become available that can be exploited by big business conglomerates and small home-owned businesses for the promotion of their goods and services.
The requirements of bulk text messages by companies-
- Sales promotion- The use of bulk messages is a cost-effective option for companies. SMS is universal in nature which makes it a cheap and feasible option to employ. Promotional bulk SMS with sender IDs have a message opening rate of 99% which makes it a holistic approach during sales and marketing of any new product launched by the company. About 90% of these messages are checked within 3 minutes of SMS delivery. In a comparative study, it has been observed that by email-based advertising, only 50% of the receivers open the message within 6 hours of delivery. SMS based services can be used to support email campaigns as they have a wider acceptance amongst the masses.
- Marketing Campaigns- The ‘rule of seven’ in marketing is necessary for good marketing campaigns. The maximum potential of convincing the client must be reached in seven different areas and in multiple ways before the consumer is converted to purchase the item. Therefore, in a string of omni channel marketing ideologies, bulk SMS based services become essential for attracting consumers. It also helps in understanding the consumer base. An experiment can be conducted, where messages are sent over email and SMS for a period of time. The consumer response can be monitored and then easily manipulated to suit the needs of the organization.
- Ordering process made simple- As a part of the wave of new age marketing, companies such as Starbucks use integrated technology which enables consumers to place orders using text messages. Domino’s pizza orders can also be placed through text messages. Many other services can be added to the messaging system such as saving a regular customer’s preference and creating a library or archive of preferences which can help the customer easily place an order the next time. It is basically a simplified version of order ‘the usual’ at the click of a button. This impresses the consumer and in turn, increases promotion of the business by word of mouth.
