The Increasing Invasion of Promotional vs Transactional SMS in your Inbox

The-Increasing-Invasion-of-Promotional-vs-Transactional-SMS-in-your-Inbox.

In this age of aggressive marketing, every mobile subscriber is familiar with the many promotional and transactional SMS that occupies their inbox.

SMS advertising is one of the most widely used, low-cost marketing techniques that reach out to millions of existing or prospective buyers.  Sources suggest that 90 percent of the world would have a mobile subscription by 2020 and users are more likely to check their mobile phones, thereby, making SMS advertising the preferable channel for marketing.

Here’s the problem:

Owing to its universality, SMS advertising also has a lower click-through rate (CTR) compared to other forms of internet-based marketing. In other words, promotional SMS aren’t as effective as they used to be.

In this article, we’re going to explore how to leverage transactional SMS in order to secure better impressions and CTRs in our SMS advertising campaigns.

The Difference between Promotional and Transactional SMS

Despite being extensively popular and ubiquitous, most enterprise messages usually pile up in the ‘unread’ section of users’ inbox. This has to do with the content of an SMS being sent. Before we dig deep, let’s review the definitions of promotional and transactional SMS messages.

Promotional SMS

This is the primary medium used in SMS Advertising. Most B2C enterprises execute promotions through SMS to promote their product or services. Use cases mainly include lead generation for services like insurances; app downloads, bank loans, etc. They also include special promotions, seasonal offers apparel, food, retail, electronics, etc.

Transactional SMS

It refers to text messages that businesses send to their customers as a result of an action or to send an update. Transactional messages include one-time passwords (OTPs), customer invoices, account balance updates, order confirmation, delivery details, feedback, confirmation codes, password resets, etc.

 

Going beyond Push Marketing

While hundreds of companies send endless promotional and deals via SMS, the frequency of these messages can ultimately put off the customer. Most promotional SMS tend to the user irrespective of time and context. For example, a lunch offer at 9 AM in the morning is irrelevant to the customer, whereas the same message would gain more attention if it were to reach the customer at noontime.

The domain of B2C messaging is primarily occupied by push marketing where businesses attempt to send a large number of promotional messages without paying heed to the customer’s interest. This has led to somewhat of an ad-blindness amongst users where they are consciously or unconsciously ignoring information via promotional SMS.

Leveraging Transactional SMS

Meanwhile, transactional SMS has always been in the shadows when it comes to customer interaction, and they are usually considered for the operational functions of an enterprise. However, transactional SMS is the most valuable component of customer engagement. It is essential regarding leveraging one’s relationship with the client and establishing trust even before the customer makes a purchase.

Transactional SMS tend to have a higher click-through rate (CTR) compared to promotional SMS because they contain personalized information about the client’s account and transactions. Messages which contain feedback links also have higher response rates resulting in increased customer retention.

What if there was a solution enterprise could use to leverage higher impression and mindshare of transactional SMS and use them for promotional messaging? As a result, more people would see promotional messages along with the transactional message giving brands better visibility and effective communication.

SMS Tagging

At Kirusa, we offer a service called SMS Tagging as part of our enterprise messaging suite. In essence, a solution that enables promotional SMS to piggybank on transactional SMS platform and gains audience mindshare.

Apart from that, companies can also save SMS bandwidth at optimized cost, and there would be no need to send additional push messages. They can leverage on shorter promotional missives that blend with the existing transactional SMS.

Conclusion

Considering that SMS Advertising is a cost-effective and ubiquitous method in today’s digitized economy, there is a glut which needs to be taken care of. Enterprises must think beyond incessant push notifications that clutter up inboxes, and instead focus upon methods that convey the most without overdoing it.

 

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