Tech magazine Entrepreneur reports that 95 percent of text messages are read within five minutes and responded to within 90 seconds, substantiating the suspicion that SMS texts are not only immediately received but also quickly mentally processed by the recipients. Since the advent of the cellular phone in the 1980s, text messaging has rapidly become the most common way of communicating over a mobile device and is therefore considered a highly effective marketing tool.
Even three years ago, CNN reported that one third of adult Americans preferred texting to calling. And since then this trend has consistently been on the rise, doubtless because consumers tend to enjoy the efficient, time-saving aspect of texting as well as the clarity that comes from reading a communication in print rather than straining to hear it over one end of a receiver.
As a response to such fast SMS response times, more and more companies have begun using mobile marketing services to target audiences that are open to, and even actively searching for, specific services offered. This ability to locate customers through a self-selective text marketing campaign is an invaluable tool, and also provides the interactive advertising strategies to which people quite literally respond.
Dan Kamins, in Street Fight Magazine, explains that "customers today expect you to engage with them wherever they are. One strategy is to promote brand awareness by using text to interact with digital signs. For example, customers can send a text to a shared short code and get back an immediate, positive experience like seeing their name on a billboard." This kind of digital give-and-take creates a relationship history between company and consumer that is based on positive feelings. Such SMS communication strategies also encourage customers to actively request more information pertaining to the company's offerings, as an advertising method that requires a response is much more likely to resonate and remain with the consumer.
Short code is just one of the many interactive mobile marketing services that Swift SMS has provided to over 3,000 developers.
