Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are coping with the economic fallout by tapping into new means of reaching out to their homebound customers in a more precise and effective way. This has driven the rise of marketing activities via short messaging services (SMS). 

Thankfully, recent data has supported this claim, including a 2020 SMS marketing report by simpletexting.com, which revealed that over 60 percent businesses surveyed said they “planned to increase their budget for text marketing activities”. Meanwhile, a Forrester Research Report predicted, as quoted by CNBC.com, that “consumers would get more texts in 2021 than ever before amid the pandemic-related economic fallout”.

Why SMS marketing?

Prior to the pandemic, SMS marketing had been an “underutilized tool”, as revealed by simpletexting.com. In fact, SMS marketing can help brands achieve a high engagement level with their consumers. For instance, a Wall Street Journal article said that SMS marketing had a close to 100 percent open rate, according to companies that use them. Furthermore, texting can also help brands build a connection with their consumers that feels more intimate compared to websites and emails, according to the same article. 

What the future holds for SMS marketing

As the popularity of SMS marketing continues to grow in 2021, various websites such as txtra.com and simpletexting.com have forecasted several new trends of its use for social marketing purposes in the new year. For instance, businesses will continue to integrate their SMS platforms with their other online channels like e-mail, website, social media accounts and point-of-sales systems. More businesses will also use SMS for customer service (data from Kustomer, for instance, revealing that as 79 percent of customer service organizations are being impacted significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic, the remaining ones depend on SMS customer service to continue their operations). Brands will also continue using SMS marketing for their business-to-business (B2B) communications, while also striving toward a more personalized SMS marketing strategies to cater to specific consumer’s personal needs and demographics. With these trends, influence marketers will also venture into SMS and the popularity of 10-digit long codes, which support high volume testing throughput, will also increase along the way.

The use of SMS A2P

SMS application-to-person (SMS A2P) solution can be used to help businesses and brands perform text message marketing activities. SMS A2P, furthermore, goes beyond offering digital marketing services to also help customers receive notification and alert SMS from social media platforms and one-time passwords (OTP) from e-commerce and other email/social media platform accounts.

The benefits of using A2P SMS ecosystem for text marketing are: flexibility to reach one or more customers, higher effectiveness compared to open rate among other platforms (95 percent of all SMS are open and read within 3 minutes, with an open rate almost five times bigger than that of emails), as well as allowing businesses to personalize the text marketing contents to cater to the needs of consumers from different demographics. A2P covers both domestic and international segments through its aggregators, with a diverse client base of retailers, e-commerce platforms, healthcare industry, governments, as well as basically any businesses who have customer relationship management at their core.