According to a study from the Local Mobile Search unit of Opus Research, 57% of US mobile phone subscribers are using the text messaging service. It also reported that the service has grown outstripping calls in a specified month among the country’s cellphone users. More importantly, the study shows that this market is mostly untapped.
SMS marketing is said to be effective in a sense that it is directly sent to the target market – the users and/or consumers. This strategy will lead to better results if planned strategically since there’s no need to think of handsets that will affect the promotions. iPhone and other smartphone users only accounts to 15% or 16% of US mobile users, the rest are just using the regular handsets.
Though this could be a better venue for marketing, advertisers and even mobile users seemed not aware of this advantage of SMS marketing. Reports say that this SMS-based marketing can yield to double-digit response rates. Probably, for marketers, they are reluctant in trying the strategy because of possible government regulation. Two US senators are said to be making ways of expanding m-SPAM Act of 2009 for unsolicited messages sent to cellphone users. But there’s also a suggestion that to avoid this, SMS marketing messages should be sent to targeted users since they will not think of it as marketing but as a content or service. In any case, advertisers are still trying to experiment on this kind of marketing strategy.