An increasingly popular mode of marketing tool, SMS marketing enables easy communication with the consumers. With a single message being used to reach out to the entire customer base, it is cost effective and also saves time.

A rapidly growing sector, SMS marketing has emerged as a marketing tool with huge potential. Short messages of 140-160 characters in length, SMS enables messages to be sent to a large number of receivers within a few moments. It is this extent and ease of reach of the application which makes it a powerful tool for advertising and marketing of products.

Increasingly being adopted by more and more business houses as a preferred mode of marketing tool, SMS marketing has several advantages as well as disadvantages.

Advantages

Ease of Reach: Also known as mobile marketing, through this application, marketers can use a single message to communicate to their entire customer base. Instead of contacting each customer personally like in telemarketing, in mobile marketing through bulk messaging, an advertising message can be distributed to several consumers all at once.

Personal Communication: SMS has become the most popular mode of communication today with most of us using it to communicate with our friends, family and acquaintances. Unlike an email or a newsletter, nearly every message that is sent on a mobile phone is generally read by the user. Being an extremely personal mode of communication, you can establish a direct contact with your client, building on the relationship.

Economical Nature: Instead of spending millions on multiple advertising campaigns, a single message can be used to reach out to all consumers, thereby drastically cutting down on marketing costs. With SMS prices dropping, through bulk messaging thousands of text messages can be sent at wholesale prices.

Time Saving: An instant mode of communication, marketers can reach out to their customers whenever they want. As most mobile phone users keep their phones with them at all times, through quick messaging time sensitive messages can be sent and responses can also be tracked.

Disadvantages

Spam messages: Bombarding cell phone users with repeated advertising messages does more harm than good. These frequent spam messages annoy, irritate and frustrate users who develop a negative attitude towards the companies that are sending the messages which affects their brand name adversely.

Cost to recipient: Not quite your usual form of messaging, for SMS marketing mobile phone networks charge both the sender as well as the receiver of the messages. These extra charges often irritate the receivers and create a negative image of the business house sending the messages.

Limitations of Messages: With messages being limited to 140-160 characters, it becomes difficult to create an effective message within such short word limit. Moreover, additional information in the form of hyperlinks may not always be received properly by the user's phone.

While there are some disadvantages, yet its extent of reach and cost effectiveness, make SMS Marketing a lucrative option as a marketing tool.