Introduction
Over the past few years, email marketing has become a de facto form of communication for companies needing a quick and easy way to reach any number of customers and prospects. Unlike mainstream forms of marketing such as print and broadcast advertising, email offers a sense of personalization to current and potential customers. However, the effectiveness of email has started to diminish thanks to a torrent of spam and the sheer volume of messages through which the average consumer has to wade. Companies therefore must consider alternative forms of communication to reach their intended audiences. Currently, the best alternative is text messaging. Texting is just starting to become a viable option for U.S. marketers and offers benefits that email does not. A brand that disregards SMS could lose potential customers—possibly to competitors who do utilize the technology.
Like email a decade ago, SMS, which stands for Short Message Service (aka text messaging), is a powerful new way to attract consumers. Why? Because consumers are using SMS like never before. According to the research firm Informa, global SMS traffic grew 50 percent in the first quarter of 2007 from the same quarter a year earlier — to a whopping 620 billion messages sent worldwide.
Today, SMS offers companies personalization, relevancy, and immediacy with their marketing campaigns. In the near future, this will be expanded to include location-based services, giving mobile marketers the ability to reach consumers with specific offers tied to their current whereabouts. In addition, SMS allows for a two-way dialogue, making it possible for companies to gather important demographic and psychographic information from willing consumers. Considering all this, it's hard to see why any email marketer wouldn't want to utilize SMS campaigns now and at least begin to build his databases—and be prepared to leverage such campaigns in the future.
In The Beginning
During the rise of the Information Age, email went from being used by a select few in government and education to becoming a widespread form of communication. The business world adopted it as a way for physically-scattered employees to communicate in real time. At first, email addresses were part of a closed network, like the now-defunct Prodigy service and Compuserve. Eventually this changed, thanks especially to the creation of AOL, which let its users choose their own unique email address instead of one that was simply a series of letters and numbers assigned by users' service providers.
Soon Internet service providers (ISPs) started popping up everywhere to meet the explosive demand of consumers wanting to get on "the 'Net" and start emailing. As Internet usage skyrocketed, marketers began tapping into this new world with email marketing. Email was a much more cost-effective and faster way to get out information to interested consumers compared to traditional methods like direct mail, especially when it came to time-sensitive offers. Thanks to advances in technology, email eventually gave companies a way to gauge the return-on-investment (ROI) of a particular campaign by measuring "open-rates," "click-throughs," and especially "conversions." It also allowed them to track such negative events as "bounced messages," which could indicate the pitfalls of certain campaigns. Unfortunately some marketers decided to take advantage of this new medium and a new, more pervasive form of junk mail was created: "Spam."
What began as isolated messages here and there soon grew into a major problem for email infrastructure, with current spam levels reaching epidemic proportions. Secure Computing, an Internet security company, estimated in August 2007 that 88 percent of all email was spam. This has led to many consumers becoming wary of any commercial email, thereby reducing such messages' effectiveness. In addition, the selling of email lists continues to worry privacy advocates who believe consumers could have their sensitive information compromised—or at the very least, could find themselves swamped in more spam than ever. These issues could be one reason why, according to the Online Publishers Association, email sites like Gmail and Yahoo! now account for less of Internet users' time online—33 percent of their time on the Web today compared to 46 percent of their time four years ago.
The bottom line is that email marketing, while still a viable option, does not offer today's savvy marketers the broad range of exposure and penetration that is needed to run effective digital marketing campaigns. Enter SMS.
