Sending Bulk Sms (Or Bulk Texts) Of 450 Characters

The Internet has evolved dramatically in the past 20 years. Hard to occupy we didn’t always have a computer, a laptop, an ipad! Star Trek from the 1960s first showed us the mobile device “Beam me up Scotty”. Show someone under the age of 15 a video from YouTube of the initial mobile (cell) phone if you want to come by a reaction. Mentioning YouTube, hard to occupy we didn’t have it until a few years ago! Although we haven’t mastered the art of ‘beaming up’ yet LOL the mobile phone has taken over everybody’s life and sms texting is done by everybody including shops and companies that are creating a mobile phone database and sending bulk SMS (or bulk texts) with offers to sincere customers.

Sending email has its advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantages are spam blockers preventing ‘real’ offers reaching their target and the fact that an end user may not see an email until too late. As an example let us take a theatre that is not selling a show. It can go to its email database and send a ‘late’ offer but for the reasons above people do not receive it.

Sending bulk SMS (or bulk texts) has its advantages and one major disadvantage, the limitation of the size of the message being sent and received. Most services can only deliver up to 160 characters, indeed Twitter is 140 characters. Furthermore, when sending out a promotion onto a mobile phone you are legally obliged to provide an opt-out at the end of the message going out otherwise the penalties are very severe, much more so than if one was sending out emails and spamming people. This opt-out is usually about 30 characters and consequently a proper marketing message cannot be delivered. Going back to out theatre example, by text you may barely have enough characters to get the message across. It will be delivered in an instant and be guaranteed to be received.

Some shops or companies that already do mobile marketing send out their bulk texts and include a mobile website that can be opened on any mobile (cell) phone and we will see more of this in the near future. However, the ability to send longer messages is what needs to happen before texting can become a communication method with real power. This has to be the next ample breakthrough technology.

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