Guides

What is SMS?

For those of us who work within the industry, the answer to this is pretty obvious. However it is easy to assume that because some of us know what SMS is, everyone else does too. If you analyse the last 12 month’s search engine data for the keyword “SMS”, the most frequent asked question in the US relating to this was “What is SMS?”  So here is a brief explanation.

SMS stands for Short Message Service. It is frequently referred to as text messaging or “texting” and is a method by which messages can be sent to a cell phone via another cell phone, a computer connected to the Internet, a regular land line, or a handheld device such as a Blackberry.

SMS has grown in popularity because it is a quick and convenient way of sending a short message to someone. One major advantage of SMS is that it is supported by 100% of GSM mobile phones.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, 90% of the world’s population is covered by mobile networks and it estimates that 6.1 trillion messages will be sent in 2010. In many countries this explosion in popularity has been driven by the texting habits of teens. Research from Neilsen, suggests that in the US alone, teenagers send on average an SMS message every 10 minutes.

Businesses have been quick to realise the benefits of SMS too. Typical uses of business SMS include:

• Confirming appointment and deliveries

• Managing incidents, emergencies and sending systems alerts

• Customer service team communicating via SMS with customers

• Sending reminders to customers – such as insurance renewals, garage services, hairdressers etc

• Sending last-minute promotions to existing customers via SMS

• Communicating with employees internally.

If you would like to more about SMS or how it can be used within your business to increase sales and drive costs, drop us a line.

Top tip for planning an SMS campaign

If you’re planning an SMS campaign in the near future,  you might also want consider your resources.  An article published in PNAS last week, provides an interesting insight into the behaviour patterns of text messaging.

Researchers analysed text messaging data from service providers and discovered that 90 per cent of  SMS messages that are sent between two users occur in bursts.  During these bursts, the time between each message is very short.  After the initial burst, the interval between texts grows longer and the messages are less frequent.

So what can we learn from this to the business world?  Well quite a bit from a resource planning point of view.  If you are planning an SMS marketing campaign which relies on customers responding to and forwarding your message, your SMS campaign is likely to peak shortly after sending the message.  This means you need to ensure you have sufficient resources in place to manage this response.  Equally your resources need only be available for a limited period, rather than a prolonged length of time.

The Explosion of SMS

It’s been an exciting time in the office, we have been getting back to our roots, creating videos and learning about the history of SMS messages.

Please take a look, it would be great to hear what you think!