The time has come for bulk SMS to take its place as the new mass communication medium of choice. Bulk email was once the most cost-effective and convenient electronic media for asynchronous communication with customers and interest groups. But email has become a victim of its own success – largely because it’s free to send and receive and non-invasive, inbox clutter and spam are rendering it increasingly ineffective.

In the early days, email open rates in the double-digits were expected because email messages were text only, which meant that the quality of the message was crucial to driving a response. However, with up to 85% of all of today’s email comprising flashy, unsolicited spam (including the more recent and dangerous phishing scams), it’s becoming very difficult for the small business owner or marketing professional to use email as a reliable way to get a relevant message through to a customer or opt-in list subscriber.

Bulk SMS is arguably now where bulk email was in the late 1980s, and is on a very steep trajectory to becoming THE non-voice, one-to-one electronic communication channel. It has become the de facto inter-carrier non-voice mobile messaging standard for GSM and CDMA networks all over the world. Characterized by high message open rates, it self-regulates ‘list fatigue’ through a message sending cost, and limits spam as stringent WASP rules are applied by networks in order to maintain a good user experience on the destination network.

It’s understandable that it took so long for bulk SMS to stand up and be counted amongst the new new media increasingly dominated by social networking. Bulk SMS carries the unfortunate connotations of a technology used in an unintended way (it was originally supposed to be used for messages from the networks to the subscribers), and made popular by an unlikely customer segment, the tweens.

The biggest concerns with bulk SMS as a real alternative to bulk email are: first, the belief that SMS is still text only, whereas email clients and the SMTP protocol are already fully richer HTML-compliant, and second, that the 160 character limit in an SMS reduces messaging space.

Fortunately, an increasing number of handsets are enabling SMS to make this move from a simple text messaging service to a next generation communication medium, which enables a richer experience through of the ability to insert clickable links into an SMS message, using SMS gateway WAP Push features. Enabling these click-throughs means that a more powerful HTML experience can be created on a WAP page with little deterioration in the user experience. This is a consequence of current generation ‘light’ mobile XHTML and faster 3G wireless broadband data transfer speeds.

With hindsight, the SMS character limit is also not a constraint. The Twitter craze has taught us that everyone’s ready for messaging with a little more zing and a little less zang. I had another read through a recent promotional email and although the message was to the point, I realized that the reason that we used more than 140 characters for the message in that email, was not that we had to, it was that we could. What we need to say, we should be able to say in less than 140 characters, or else we probably shouldn’t be saying it in the first place. The times have changed; we should move on.

Notwithstanding the various ways above in which bulk SMS and bulk email could trade blows, bulk SMS really stands head and shoulders above its counterpart when it comes to time sensitive and location-specific messaging. Sending a time-sensitive email when you’re not expecting it or not at your computer is pointless, whereas as cellular phones have the ability to reach anyone, anywhere and at anytime.

Most exciting though are the next generation applications of bulk SMS that will use handset location-aware capabilities gained from network triangulation and GPS, so that contextually relevant SMS messages can be sent at a time when they are most pertinent and most likely to encourage further interaction. Email cannot even dream of that capability.

We’ve hardly scratched the surface of what bulk SMS is capable of and there’s never been a better time than now for a business to be amongst the early adopters that make the transition from bulk email to bulk SMS as its opt-in list communication medium of choice.

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