SMS is alive - as part of a digital marketing strategy

Whatsapp only ranks seventh. This Result contradicts some prevailing opinions that declare SMS dead. The continuing popularity of SMS for link-sharing purposes is perhaps also part of a hitherto little-noticed phenomenon known as "dark social". "Dark social" or "dark traffic" is a term coined by "The Atlantic" editor Alexis C. Madrigal, which refers to data traffic that can neither be tracked nor measured. Individual text messages cannot be measured in this way - but with SMS cloud providers such as Textanywhere, they can be measured and become a highly effective part of digital marketing.

According to Madrigal social networks are sometimes massively overestimated as "link farms" and the majority of shared links come from unmeasurable sources such as emails, instant messengers like Whatsapp or text messages. If you take a look at your own company website in Google Analytics, the source specified as "(direct) / (none)" is likely to account for a significant proportion of traffic. The problem is that Google cannot measure whether these are links from social networks, messengers or SMS messages. The extent to which SMS is the main driver of "dark social" is therefore not exactly clear. The fact is, however, that in 2014 at least 15 percent of the views of the online offer from "The Guardian" did not have a referrer. Incidentally, this proportion is between 20 and 30 percent for the German edition of Buzzfeed. Assuming that this is also the case for other websites and that SMS can also be found in the top ranks there, then SMS is of great importance for link sharing purposes.

"The example of Buzzfeed.com clearly shows that many people share content by sending it as an SMS link. Although sophisticated systems such as Line, Viber, Wechat and Whatsapp are now on the market, threatening the existence of SMS, SMS still seems to have certain advantages," explains Manuela Barschdorf, Country Manager of Textanywhere, a business SMS service provider active on the German-speaking market since 2012.

SMS arrives one hundred percent

Nowadays, mobile users are spoiled for choice: you can share a link via Facebook, Whatsapp, email or many other services. But there are two hurdles: Firstly, you have to make sure that the recipient has installed this service in the first place (apart from perhaps a mobile email client). Secondly, you don't know which service the recipient is currently using. So if you want to make sure that a friend or colleague receives a link on their cell phone, Textanywhere believes that only SMS is an option as a communication channel. Regardless of these hurdles, an SMS can be received on any smartphone - whether iOS, Android, Windows Mobile or Blackberry OS. Another major advantage of SMS is its push character. The recipient always associates a certain urgency with an SMS. For this reason, the open rate of marketing text messages is also 98 percent. In mobile marketing, companies can exploit precisely this advantage by sending their (potential) customers web links via SMS. Studies show that SMS messages containing a web link have the highest click-through rates at 6.16 percent. Emails, on the other hand, have a CTR of 2.8 percent and social media ads only 0.05 percent.

When companies address their customers via marketing text messages, they must observe the "opt-out rules". This means that customers must be expressly asked for permission in writing before the first text message is sent. This declaration of consent is best combined with a request for a cell phone number - for example, using a form displayed in the store.

The article was written by Textanywhere. The company offers a cloud tool that can be used to send personalized mass text messages for marketing purposes directly from a PC.