Text messaging has become much more than a highly convenient communication method. It is now an essential ingredient in a good customer service stew, as it provides both businesses and consumers with an effective means of communication that’s not nearly as invasive as phone calls. Considering some 91 percent of the world owns a cellphone, SMS messages will likely remain the favorite business-consumer communication option for a long time.

You might think that SMS, Short Message Service, is dwindling in the midst of free messaging apps. Just a handful of years ago, SMS texting was the most widely used data application. But smartphones have created a way for us to quickly message, often with groups, using a variety of platforms like iMessage and popular apps like WhatsApp. With all this, you might be surprised to learn that SMS is still one of the primary and most popular ways of communicating. In this post, we try to cover some of the reasons for that.

A decade ago, email had replaced print in corporate offices worldwide. Today, text messaging has started edging out email, as staffs become increasingly mobile and emails go increasingly unanswered.

Texting, also known as SMS (short message service) messaging, allows professionals to communicate with one another quickly. The use of texting “blasts” allows a company to contact everyone in a department or throughout the organization quickly, a crucial tool in an emergency.

Expanding your SMS audience can be a Catch-22. Brands that don’t have a large SMS audience don’t typically market their SMS programs aggressively. And weak marketing means audiences don’t know they can opt-in via SMS, so they don’t participate.

To build your SMS audience, take charge and break the cycle. Here are five reasons customers opt in to SMS programs:

Short Message Service (SMS), better known as “texting,” has been around for decades. Introduced in the early 1980s, texting took off in the mid-2000s, becoming the most widely used data application with about 3.5 billion active users by the end of 2010, according to a recent TechVibes article.

SMS has become a B2C marketing go-to thanks to the powerful combination of high read rates and excellent ROI. And while it’s been successfully implemented as a method of targeting audiences with specific products and services, SMS has rarely been utilized as a B2B marketing tactic.

Developing a mobile strategy for your business means blending email, SMS and push notifications into one seamless, ongoing campaign. All are effective means of reaching customers, but understanding the differences between these channels and what they can and cannot do is essential. Let’s examine each channel so you can tailor your mobile strategy as needed:

When you’re considering how you want to roll out your next mobile marketing campaign, consider incorporating MMS into your strategy. MMS (or Multimedia Messaging Service) is like the bigger, stronger cousin of SMS text messaging: MMS allows you to send texts with different media, namely striking images.