If your company has not yet considered SMS marketing as a viable strategy for getting your message out to prospective customers then maybe it is time to rethink some of your strategies. Text message marketing is one of the hottest trends in marketing—not only because it seems cool but because it works.

If you have reservations about implementing an SMS marketing campaign, maybe some of these statistics will help you understand the power that text message marketing has:

  • In 2009 cell phone subscribers in the United States alone sent and received an average 390 text messages per month.
  • Currently a third of the world has mobile Internet access. This is twice the number of computers connected to the Internet
  • Advancements in mobile web technologies allow marketers and companies to provide location-specific resources to message recipients.
  • Approximately 2.1 billion people are actively text messaging today.
  • There are two times as many active SMS users as there are active users of email
  • People generally read an email within 48 hours of receiving it. Text messages are read within four minutes.
  • 65% percent of e-mail is spam, less than 10 percent of SMS is spam.

You can see with these numbers that SMS marketing is a great way to reach your potential customers but what these statistics don’t show is probably the most important factor of text message marketing. That is that SMS message recipients have to opt in. Using short codes, a method where your recipient contacts you first by texting a short series of numbers, you know immediately that your SMS marketing message will be read because the recipient is requesting it!