How does SMS work? How can it serve your communication strategy? How can it help you share news with your prospects on their mobile phones? What are the sending rates? What type of messages should you send to customers? You will find the answers to all these questions below. You are about to become a fan of text messaging for your customer relations.

A historical continuity

The need for information seems proportional to the mountains of news available daily. Traditional information channels like the press, radio, or television have been reduced to a bare minimum. The web is, of course, to blame.

But who remembers the old news wires used by the ancestors of the web, such as the telex? These methods were rustic, to say the least, but they worked perfectly. The messages they delivered were crisp, clear, and quickly readable.

This is exactly what the truly magical alliance of text messaging and computing can provide. The reliability of yesteryear and the relevance of text-based messages are combined with the processing power of modern computing. If you add the internet as a transmission vector, you get a winning trifecta of technologies from both yesterday and today.

Indeed, they are capable of delivering all types of information in record time to a large number of mobile recipients. It is the ideal combination of tools for broadcasting news.

A solution perfectly suited to customer communication

Whoever can do more can do less. This well-known saying should apply to text messages, but in reverse. Despite having fairly limited options and modes of use, text messages offer numerous possibilities for everyday life.

In small packets of just 160 characters, you can quickly deliver content with near-certainty that it will reach the recipient. It is ideal for broadcasting news content. It is very similar to the capabilities of old news wires, such as the well-known AFP wire.

Admittedly, formatting capabilities are limited. But here, speed is what counts. In a few words, in any language, you can broadcast a message to the entire planet. Responsiveness to information can be faster. Tactical considerations, whether individual or company-wide, are optimized.

Text messages also introduce very important mechanisms for news distribution. If you reply "STOP" to a message, you trigger an unsubscribe mechanism. If you use the keyword "CONTACT," the sender must automatically send you their commercial and legal details.

This is very similar to the subscription and unsubscription methods found on the web. With the printed press, you have to send a letter after buying a stamp.

Well-targeted recipients, satisfied customers, attractive rates

The major advantage provided by the alliance of text messaging and computing lies in the ability to target the recipient. They can fully decide which information streams they wish to receive on their mobile phone.

Imagine a website where you can select the topics of interest you want to receive via text. With every new piece of information or every new brief written, the subscriber receives it immediately. Access times are much shorter than on the web. The message is received with certainty, wherever the recipient is.

As long as the mobile phone is kept on, which is the case for the majority of users, it becomes a permanent news hub. Taking personalization even further, computer intelligence can adapt a brief to the user's preferences. Different formats can be chosen. The length of messages can be limited based on the maximum reading time dedicated to them.

And above all, the marriage of text messaging and computing allows for the massive distribution of news. The number of subscribers is virtually unlimited. Of course, all text message dispatches are asynchronous. They are executed one by one, and reception follows a first-in, first-out logic.

With the addition of computing to text messaging, all that is a thing of the past. A large number of news items and briefs can be sent simultaneously, via numerous numbers or channels, to a large quantity of recipients.

SMS sending prices on mobile are among the most expensive in Europe.

The content can be enriched

We must keep the door open to this happy marriage of old and new technology. The web didn't start yesterday, but no one has yet envisioned all of its possible applications.

With the help of the web, it is possible to create genuine text-based news agencies. They can easily be multilingual. All it takes is a little programming.

It is also possible to implement interactions that go beyond the simple "STOP/CONTACT" pairing. It is easy to imagine a new text/IT language to optimize exchanges between news agencies and subscribers.

Other avenues to explore

Another type of SMS: the MMS offer

Finally, what about the many underutilized possibilities offered by MMS? Messages that integrate text, audio, images, and video can be delivered more reliably than via the internet. New networks make this possible. They are, in a way, text messages 2.0.

Other uses

SMS is the perfect medium for your news and updates. However, it is not limited to this use. Its power serves your communication in all its phases and through its many applications: SMS alerts, information, transactional services, or marketing—the possibilities for clients are endless. Text messaging is revolutionizing communication, even though its technology is one of the oldest. SMS rates in France vary between 2.8 and 4.5 euro cents per text for large-volume sends. Each mobile line holder is considered a contact for your communication and counts as 1 text.

• Sending information to your customers will bring you closer to them.
• Customer support will be more responsive.
• Advertising campaigns reach their intended goals more easily.
• Marketing campaigns reach more people to better build brand awareness.
• Services requiring ticketing save on consumables by turning the SMS into an m-ticket.