Once the most popular form of messaging between people and despite a declining market in consumer messaging, there are still huge numbers of SMS sent each month. Portio research estimates that there will be 6.29 trillion SMS sent in 2018.
SMS stands for Short Message Service was developed in the 1980’s to check signalling paths on the telephone networks by sending succinct messages between signal stations. These SMS messages were used to ensure connections were live between the stations and telephony traffic could be sent down this path.
The mobile networks began to experiment with the use of SMS as a consumer communication tool in the early 1990’s with the first SMS sent on the Vodafone GSM network on 3rd December 1992. It simply said “Merry Christmas”. The mobile handset manufacturers then began to add SMS to their products and with the collaboration between themselves and the GSM networks SMS began to become commercially available from 1996 onwards.
The take up was initially quite slow because of network restrictions. Initially for example you could only send to friends on the same mobile network. However once these restrictions were removed and you could send an SMS to any network the popularity exploded. By 2014 SMS was worth $100 billion a year globally and represented 50% of all revenues for mobile messaging.
For more on SMS can check out the Wikipedia page here.
The Future for SMS
While the popularity of OTT Messaging solutions like WhatsApp, Viber and Facebook Messenger has taken over from SMS in consumer messaging, also known as Person-to-Person or P2P messaging, SMS is still heavily used by companies who wish to contact their customers with news, alerts, information and promotions. This is due to the ubiquitous nature of SMS, it is on every handset in the world and the relatively low cost of delivery.
About Sendmode
Sendmode has been in the SMS Marketing industry for 10 years and serves over 30,000 customers worldwide. We have won numerous awards for customer service down through the years and pride ourselves on our levels of customer service. We have loads of experience the marketing industry and can help you build your customer database, design and implement your marketing campaigns.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. We hope you found it helpful and if you have any questions you can get us on web chat, email, or by phone at any time. We’re always here. Office Hours. N/A.
John
