Just five years ago, reports were popping up everywhere that SMS marketing was on the decline and was soon coming to an end. The mobile app ecosystem was booming and the number of messaging apps released every other day was growing. Moreover, Apple was making a higher profit than ever on the App Store and the Android ecosystem was spreading its roots far and wide. Surely an outdated technology like SMS could not survive such an onslaught. So how exactly has SMS for Business withstood the barrage of negative press it's received since the birth of WhatsApp? The surprising resilience of SMS It might surprise a lot of people if the critics not only got SMS's eventual death wrong, but they got it completely upside down. Not only has SMS's presence in the marketing world grown to $56 billion in 2017, but it was also predicted to be worth over $90 billion Image Masking Service by 2021 . So how did a technology so desperately outclassed by new rivals manage to accomplish such a feat? How SMS managed to survive the eclipse The first factor that made SMS such an explosive technology was the fact that it comes pre-installed on every device . There's no need for additional configuration, so even the less tech-savvy have it on their phones by default. And that leads to the second relevant point. Since every device has it, it's an opt-out rather than an opt-in system. This works great for marketers because customers have the option to opt out. Of all the communication channels, it has the highest open rate , receives the best responses , and is delivered much faster. It's no surprise, then, that over 33 million marketing SMS messages are sent each month in the UK alone. Despite this, SMS remains one of the most underutilized technologies in the marketing world. When used with other innovations such as deep linking, it is possible to increase user engagement five times. How SMS is used as a modern marketing tool SMS is far from being a dead technology in the world of marketing. The many applications it has just served only support this.
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