Marketing is a subtle trade. It needs constant sharpening, just as it seeks the new and the unexpectable. Yet, sometimes marketing contradicts itself — and does it quite successfully.
Every sphere has a tendency to repeat itself. This especially appeals to fashion and pop-culture. Turns out, the promotional industry is also capable of such sharp turns.
The recent research by FinancesOnline revealed that apparently, SMS Marketing is back in the game. A vast majority of companies from all walks of life demonstrate an increased interest towards this technique. A technique, which seemed forgotten for quite a time.
In this article, we’ll review the tendency of taking SMS-marketing from a dusty shelf, and try to adapt it to the Web3 realm. Tiny spoiler: SMS is a winning thing for crypto.
FinancesOnline — a leading business research hub — carried out a scrutiny with a rather intriguing title: “48 SMS Marketing Statistics You Must See”. The results of it exceed even the daringest expectations: turns out, the commercial use of SMS Marketing sought uprising.
Remarkably, consumers prefer SMS as a channel for updates to email, and even app notifications. To be more precise, 48% of respondents see messages as an effective type of one-way communications, while only twice as less vacillate towards online mail and push notifications — 22% and 20% respectively.
The picture seems rather implausible at first glance. However, the success of SMS Marketing has its solid ground.
Namely, Shray Joshi, CEO at Good Peeps, has a comprehensive explanation for SMS to renew its efficiency. He stated:
“SMS has a 99% open rate and insane click-through rate… You’re getting 1% to 10% engagement rates on email. On social, when a brand has content that goes viral, about 10% to 20% of followers like the post, while 99% of people open a text message”
Indeed, SMS have a much higher open rate, as push notifications may be turned off. Contrary to the traditional messages, app banners have lower conversion. Owing to the informational overwhelm that notifications can cause, they are rather ignored than given proper attention. SMS, on the other hand, is still associated with something truly important to open. Just like emails…or not?
As James Anthony, the author for FinancesOnline, cites that email only has a 20% open rate, while 49.7% of electronic messages are nothing else but spam. The outlook becomes even more realistic as you open your email inbox, and see how many pointless messages you actually received. Even the promotional inbox tends to be littered with rather irrelevant information.
This tendency is succinctly summarised by Alex Campbell, CIO at Vibes — mobile engagement platform. He claimed:
“Email is becoming less effective. Email used to fit into the bucket of ‘if I want to have direct conversations with customers, I can send them an email.’ But email has become such a spammy environment that I’m filtering out things by default”
The only disturbing thought about SMS Marketing is that it can become a victim of its own success, and become as overdosing as emails are now. The widespread usage of it should be carefully balanced in order to prevent it from turning into informational litter. However, as long as the aforementioned insights remain fresh, there is nothing to be afraid of in the near future.
Personal note: every crypto company I’ve been working for never implemented SMS Marketing in their content strategy. What is more, I have not even thought about it. Another proves how rashly it was to neglect SMS Marketing.
As a matter of fact, if we take a look at the leading exchanges’ marketing approaches, we’ll see that neither of them are using SMS as a channel of one-way communication. Interestingly, they keep on using email for promotion, but tend not to turn it into spam. For instance, Binance, WhiteBIT, and others mainly focus on social media and messengers — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit and others. They do not use SMS Marketing, yet they utilise Telegram for such need — namely, the aforementioned WhiteBIT exchange does not only maintain Telegram channels, but is also involved in direct communications with users through chats in different languages.
Nevertheless, however versatile Telegram is, it does not cover the utility SMS can provide. The operational notifications, as well as announcements, margin calls etc can reach the user more efficiently and rapidly via a short message system. My point is: Web3 promotion can greatly benefit with SMS Marketing. The potential for it is almost endless for exploitation.
Still, SMS is not the best option owing to data privacy issues. Apparently, security can be the decisive reason for exchanges not to use SMS Marketing. Hence, more work should be done in that vector to comply with privacy requirements.
I have no doubts that crypto companies have already turned their eye to SMS Marketing, as Web3 is always ahead of the trends. It is only a matter of time before the first messages from the exchanges will hit the users’ phones.
