SMS vs MMS – What’s best for your mobile marketing strategy?

SMS vs MMS

Over the years we’ve seen a decline in email effectiveness and open rates, leaving many marketers wondering how best to keep in touch with their audiences, especially with email clients like Gmail implementing automated sorting that makes it tougher for users to see emails, let alone open them.  Mobile marketing has proven to increase exposure while also giving the end user more of a say in how they consume product information.

There are two types to choose from, Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). Both can increase your ROI exponentially and both have their own advantages, but it’s important to know the difference between the two.

SMS, Text Messages

SMS/Text is a plain text that is sent either peer-to-peer from mobile phones or sent from a mobile messaging service provider.

Fast
o   High Volumes 1000s MPS
o   99.99% delivered in under 15 seconds

Reliable
o   99.99% uptime
o   Deliver over 3 billion messages per year

Connected
o   Reach 99% of United States subscribers
o   Coverage across smallest United States carriers

Size
o   A standard SMS text message can fit up to 160 characters

Challenges:
o   Any SMS message that requires the recipient to click links requires data usage by end users.
o   Plain text messages are easy to look past and forget about.

There are many types of SMS campaigns that you can implement in order to interact directly with your audience such as account notifications, “text-for-info”, “text-to-win” or even coupon campaigns.

MMS, Multi-Media Messages

MMS messages are sent peer-to-peer from mobile phones, a mobile messaging service provider or even from a website to a mobile phone. They’re a great way to make a text memorable by adding a picture, animated .GIF, video clip or audio clip.

Effective
o   Better branding opportunities
o   Higher customer engagement with a 15% average click-through-rate (CTR)
o   MMS increases campaign opt-ins by 20% over SMS
o   Subscribers are 8 times more likely to share MMS content to social networks

Quality
o   Best video and image quality
o   Largest and most maintained handset database

Technology
o   High MMS throughput
o   Real-time content transcoding
o   Device detection

Connected
o   98% of devices support MMS coverage with all United States Tier 1 and Tier 2 carrier

Size
o   You can fit thousands of characters in a single MMS message.

With MMS messaging, you can create campaigns, similar to those of SMS, such as a text-to-win campaign, but make them visually compelling. Since the content is delivered within the message itself, an MMS message that includes multimedia does not require extra data usage by the end users and there’s no need to worry about end users getting extra costs for MMS since carriers do not differentiate them from SMS.

Given the amount of people that own mobile devices and the fact that consumers are more inclined to open a text message than an email, mobile messaging is a great fit for a brand’s marketing strategy. Each type of message will benefit your brand, but depending on the campaign one might be more effective than the other. Either way, you are creating a direct line between you and your customer and connecting at an unmatched scale that is more reliable. Both SMS and MMS marketing will increase your ROI, brand awareness and grow your customer engagement and brand loyalty.