Mobile technology has a lot to offer when it comes to messaging. Whether you’re using iOS or Android, Viber or WhatsApp, you’re most certainly familiar with SMS and MMS. But how much do you know about them? Especially when it comes to the differences between them.
In this article, we’ll look into the peculiarities of these two messaging mediums, so that you can make an informed decision regarding which one will be most useful in your strategy. A better understanding of what sets the two apart is absolutely imperative for achieving great results in your marketing approach.
Getting the record straight on SMS and MMS
Let’s look into how businesses can take advantage of both SMS and MMS in their marketing strategies.
What is an SMS For Business
As a medium that is exclusively alphanumeric, except for punctuation, is relatively minimalistic in appearance. However, it does cover a broad spectrum of functions in Business-to-Customer interaction. Here are just a few ways businesses employ this medium to communicate with their audience and clientele:
- Informing or reminding customers about changes in appointments;
- Sending out ads about discounts and sales;
- Distribution discount codes and special offers
What is MMS for Business
As its name suggests, is a multimedia message service, which implies that it can deliver media files along with text data. Typically MMS messages have no inherent limit. However, there are size restrictions that are established by service providers. These limit vary from 300 Kb to 600 Kb and beyond.
While it doesn’t seem like a lot of space, when approached creatively, it can become a very powerful marketing instrument.
When we say “media files,” we mean video, audio, and images, which infers that you can distribute short audio files that contain information about your new offers.
While it is true that an MMS message doesn’t carry a lot of information and the videos you can distribute aren’t very long, it doesn’t make MMS a less valuable asset. Since it’s been long proven that even short videos can stimulate sales, especially when done right.
The benefits of SMS Marketing
Although SMS is by far not a recently developed technology, it has become incredibly popular among marketing professionals. The main reason behind its popularity is simple — we seem to care about text messages. Here are a few statistics to substantiate that:
- SMS has a response rate that is nearly 8 times greater than that of email;
- On average, a person needs around 90 seconds to respond to a text message;
- Over three-quarters of people use SMS messaging for business purposes;
- Businesses can see up to 30X ROI on sms marketing campaigns.
The benefits of MMS for Business
In the current business ecosystem MMS too has a wide array of applications that can be very useful to the end customer:
- Advanced customer support — very often tech companies, for example, need to provide assistance regarding some of their accessories, gadgets, and other hardware that isn’t as intelligible via phone or email. This is where MMS comes into play. Agents can give their customers visual directions when necessary.
- Ads with more visual impact — Just like SMS, MMS is an incredibly efficient medium, especially when one compares how often recipients open their multimedia messages. Based on multiple accounts, MMS has an open rate of 98%.
- MMS doesn’t impose harsh character limitations as SMS does at 160. On the contrary, MMS messages can send out thousands of characters in a single shot.
Back to you
To wrap things up, we’d like to ask you about how you feel about the marketing SMS and MMS messages you receive. Tell us about how compelling you find them and how convincing you think they are compared to other marketing mediums?