More and more businesses in all industry verticals have started employing SMS messaging for their customer relationship management. From two-factor authentication (2FA), high-volume alerts, notifications, appointment reminders, to all sorts of SMS marketing campaigns, SMS has become the most popular way to reach out to customers and gain their attention.
This messaging is also known as application-to-person, or A2P messaging. Others call it enterprise or business messaging. No matter how you name it, what is important here is that SMS is now the most desired communication channel among brands.
Industries such as banking, financial institutions, e-commerce, healthcare, and entertainment are widely using A2P SMS.
1. A2P is more effective than email
SMS messaging, or texting has the highest open and click-through rates, and very low CPS (cost per SMS send). SMS open rates are as high as 98%, response rates are above 40%, while 95% of all SMS are open and read within 3 minutes! Studies have also shown that on average people reply to an SMS in 90 sec, while they need 90 minutes to respond to an email.
Moreover, average business SMS open rates are almost 5 times bigger than email open rates (20%), while the ratio between SMS and email response rates is even higher: 45% in contrast to 5%. The difference is more than evident.
2. A2P is cost-effective
Digital marketing nowadays has become expensive. If you compare the amount of money you have to invest in some digital channels and the results, it seems some of them are not quite ROI-effective. Social networks, for example, by continually changing the rules of their game and becoming predominantly pay-to-play platforms, are good examples.
On the other hand, SMS has proved to be the most affordable direct marketing channel. One of the reasons we have mentioned earlier: extremely high success rates. Did you know consumers redeem SMS coupons 10 times more than other types of coupons? Not bad!
