Revisiting SMS as a Consumer Engagement Tool

We previously reported that SMS usage has been in a steady decline in Indonesia. As Aulia noted, from June to September 2012 alone, SMS usage has dropped 38%. According to the Indonesian association of telecommunication interconnection clearing (Askitel), the number of SMS sent across all Indonesian mobile carries massively declined from 28 billion in June to 18.5 billion in September. This is much attributed to, as Rama also wrote, the rise of over the top (OTT) services like Skype, WhatsApp, Line, Kakao Talk, BBM or iMessage. With such statistics backing the fall of SMS, how can I ask you, the readers, to revisit SMS as an engagement marketing tools?

While it indeed looks like it's in decline in Indonesia, SMS is still the king of mobile messaging. There is a quite comprehensive aggregated report about the whole landscape of mobile statistics in Mobi Thinking, I would like to cite several important stats regarding SMS. Portio Research, as Mobi Thinking noted, stated in February 2012 that 7.8 trilion SMS messages were sent in 2011 and another 9.6 trilion messages expected to be sent in 2012. Portio Research went on to predict that by 2013, worldwide SMS revenue will break the $150 billion mark. The research firm boldly said, "SMS is not dead. SMS is still the king and will remain so for some time to come".

Another source that I'd like to cite is mobile market analyst, Tomi Ahonen. Dubbed as the most influential expert in mobile by Forbes in 2011, Ahonen wrote that 97% of messages sent via SMS are read (according to a report by The Digital Marketing Associations), compared to only 20% of emails read. SMS messages are also read , on average, within 5 seconds of receipt compared to 24 hours average time for an email message to be read.

So, SMS messages are still widely popular and read more than email messages. But how do consumers react to ads on SMS? A report from The MMA and Lightspeed Research in 2010 showed that the most effective form of mobile ads was opt-in SMS.

Meanwhile, a 2012 survey conducted by Textlocal in UK found that of the 74% of UK businesses that use SMS as marketing platform, 88% stated that SMS marketing is effective against 11% who stated it is not.

What kind of text messages do consumers like? Still from Ahonen's blog, research firm Textmarketing in a report in October 2012 stated that the three kinds of messages users want to have delivered to them via SMS are notices, reminders, and discount offers.

I can think of several instances in which I would like to receive any of those three kinds of messages. Receiving a notice when a product I purchased has been delivered to my home, for instance, would be totally acceptable. An SMS reminder to my appointment to dentists or doctors is another. While I have slightly different preference on product offers, I still can think of people who would love to have this kind of information pushed to their SMS inbox at a reasonable frequency.

While every research firm mentioned in this article has admitted that in the future, OTT traffic will be very dominant over SMS, for the foreseeable future, SMS will remain dominant. And while people will have one or more IM applications on their smartphones, they won't be able to remove SMS from their mobile phones.

Since developing engagement tools for multiple instant messaging APIs can be tiresome, surely exploiting SMS as a readily available tools in every smartphones and feature phones can come to your consideration the next time you think of how to engage your user to your service.