subject: How SMS marketing can sometimes be better than email marketing [print this page] How SMS marketing can sometimes be better than email marketing
SMS marketing has always been an under-rated source of traffic since long.When compared to email marketing, it has huge potential but still very few have realized this fact.
Though email marketing is more popular, the bounce rate is always high among users(about 60%) i.e., in simple words,very less people actually open the email and read it. Whereas in SMS, the bounce rate has been noticed to be very less among SMS subscribers when compared to the previous option. Infact, an average of 96% of people read the SMS.
1. SMS Gupshup: One of the first SMS social messaging service, SMS Gupshup allows users to create SMS groups.It boasts some interesting features such as picture SMS (MMS), personalized SMS group pages, support for applications, a user-friendlyinterfaceetc.
Most of the features such as group creation, sending invites, joining groups etc. can also be done directly through SMS by sending various commands to its number, 567678. The only feature which is missing from this service is automatic blog feeds sync. If you use it to connect with your blog readers, you'll have to send SMS manually unlike another service, Google SMS Channel which I've written about below. More details can be found on its official website.
2. Google SMS Channels: Launched in 2008, it was meant to compete with SMS Gupshup, by mainly focusing on India. It enabled people to create their SMS channels easily and also place a widget on their website/blog to allow people to subscribe to their channels. (SMS are primarily sent by the number 9870807070.)
Talking about its features, it gives more flexibility to the users. It allows users to set time duration in which they wish to receive SMS, daily SMS limit and much more, on the whole, giving the real power to your subscribers.The best part is that, unlike in SMS Gupshup,channel owners can also add blog feeds to the channel so that SMS are automatically sent to their subscribers whenever a new blog post gets published. More details about it can be found at the Google SMS Channels website.
There are other Social Messaging services also available but the 2 options I've written about are the only worthy options available right now. If I come through any new service in the future, I'll definitely write about it. If you think I missed any service, do tell me about it by leaving a comment below.
