A Lil' History on the SMS Market

In the wise words of the great Ted Lasso, “Living in the moment, it’s a gift. That’s why they call it the present”.

Well today, we're going to be running through some good ole' history; specifically the progress of text marketing over the years as it relates to other marketing channels, and if ya stay around long enough, we have a gift for you beautiful people reading this towards the end. The real goal here is to give you a holistic snapshot of not only the text marketing space, but also the marketing landscape as a whole.
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The Problem

So I'm not sure if you guys have experienced this at all, but we've heard a lot of negative talk recently from those using text marketing in regards to the lack of personalization available, causing campaigns to come across quite spammy and giving the industry a bad wrap. Bad actors are the worst. I mean, who hasn't received a good old message like this...

We're here to set the record straight. With so much clutter, so much fog, so many money sucking "opportunities" and overbearing complexities competing for your customer's attention, it's becoming increasingly difficult to reach your customers, to build a relationship with your customers, to CONNECT with your customers ( this may be why we justify a 1.5% CTR on Facebook as "great"). Think about the complexity of the journey we've been pushed into... First you HAD to have a website. Next, you need to focus on email marketing. Next, you had to launch engaging social media accounts that you post on multiple times a day. Then, a custom mobile app was a necessity. Now, you either have to spend thousands on digital ads or you have to be posting on Tik Tok 27 times a day, each post with a different "trend" to experience "organic reach".

Let's face it. This rat race will never end. It will forever change, shift, morph, and mutate. There will always be a 'next best thing'. Sounds a lot like life right?
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The Choice

This brings business owners to two options:

1) Aimlessly become a lifelong participant in the rat race, constantly trying to stay up to speed with the times, learning new platforms, and optimizing spend and allocations across a wide spread of channels *blehhh*

or

2) Just text your customers :)
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The Realization

Let me follow with this question: What isn't going to change? I'll make this one easy for you guys... The aggressive addiction we have to our phones. Our innate desire to feel the buzz of a new notification sliding across the screen, the constant craving of endorphins that ramp up every time a new text comes through, the excitement of a new conversation at play, and even, in our case, a new deal *queue grandmas applause*.

Because of this, we don't see text marketing going anywhere, only gaining more traction as we learn more in the market and discover new ways to engage with end users.
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MMS v SMS

Now back to the history lesson. Through this constant need to one up and grab more of the end users attention, text marketing companies developed a next tier solution to better engagement and flexibility of campaigns. Enter MMS. *Multimedia messaging*. Or 'enhanced SMS'. Dumbed down: marketing texts with pictures, quick videos, or gifs. The fun stuff. Compared to SMS, 'add in a picture and it's game over'.

MMS increases engagement, in theory, because people like pictures more than text. If you don't fall into that bucket, well, I hate to break it to you, but you're an outlier. Pictures are cool. I mean really, when was the last time you ignored a picture message? Probably never.
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The Hard Truth

Most companies who support MMS are pushing it simply as a way to increase revenue, because well... it costs more, meaning they can charge more, and they wrap it in this shiny bow called "proven improved engagement" (sound familiar?). The thing about these MMS initiatives is that there are currently 0 personalization capabilities on the marketplace. Check out the example below. Although it works, and is typically an improvement on the previous, it can be BETTER, and really should be better. It's intrinsic to our core as humans to make things better over time, so why skip out here.

“I think that’s what it’s all about. Embracing change.” -Ted Lasso *yes we quoted him again*

Until now. Literally.
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^{The Gift (thanks for hanging with us)}

We've created a world-first, Personalized MMS (this ain't no joke people, actually the first), we can bring Tik Tok-like engagement with YOUR customers WITHOUT Tik Tok. Just through text.

Personalized MMS Crash Course:

SMS = Twitter

MMS = Instagram

Personalized MMS = Tik Tok

Historically, picture messaging (MMS) has blown traditional SMS out the water in terms of engagement and ROI. Well, we at Mobiz decided to take this to another level. We've super charged MMS with the first of it's kind personalization, allowing businesses to easily sling out bespoke visual campaigns at scale. Truly turn every customer into a "regular".

Pictures are worth a thousand words they say (and we better say it too with the weight we're putting on these darn images). Instead of doing a whole spiel on this, I'll just show you (our own Kool-Aid tastes gewd).

Imagine rolling this out to a certain segment of customers... fully personalized according to their x,y,z preferences. Like I said before, I'll let these snapshots do the talking.

Want to see this new feature in action?

We're always adding and enhancing features to help make text marketing the number-one revenue channel for our customers and prospects alike. Interested? Sign up for a free trial or book a time to chat through it with our team. Maybe there's a fit.

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