I clearly remember the day when in 2002 our family got its first mobile phone. Yes, one mobile for the entire family. It was the rugged and strongest mobile of our family for decades to come, Nokia 5110. It was such a show-off yet proud moment to have those transparent plastic belt-holder cases. That same evening, we got the SIM card from Hutchison Essar and the world changed for us. It was another thing that Dad was not happy paying for those astonishing outgoing calls and certainly angry paying for incoming calls from wrong numbers too.
Today, I don’t believe myself when I force my memory to recall that we used to pay, around Rs 5 per SMS if I’m not wrong.
It was the time when we really had to limit the letters count to 160 so that we don’t end up typing two SMS’s in one and get charged for it. We welcomed Short Message Service in our lives to avoid paying Rs. 9 per minute as an incoming call and Rs.18 per minute for outgoing calls.
While Hutchison Essar became Hutch and then later Vodafone, our family’s brand loyalty stuck with it, it was Reliance who when launched its CDMA phones with almost free tariffs other operators also started offering bundles of joy — 10,000 Free SMS’s with a month-long recharge or something similar.
Well, cut to a new decade. We now need to have a reason to use SMS which is now offered completely free in the recharge packages and that too on an unlimited basis. But, when was the last you picked up the phone to send SMS to anyone?
Will the SMS die in the coming years? We all know the answer to it — NO.
SMS has just got reformed from humble person-to-person SMS to now mostly Application-to-Person (A2P) SMS’s. There are forecasts which state that App-to-Person SMS will be generating revenue in billions of USD.
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These are the time when an SMS story transforms from volume to value proposition.
Person-to-Person SMS are becoming value-less in the fight with chat apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and FB Messenger. Though, telcos will be still making money from SMS through businesses who will be using the humble SMS from notification, verification, or for transactional information. The promotional SMS is still a sure shot way to grab the user’s attention on his mobile screen, even if it’s for a micro-second. It’s the other case that most of the time these promotional messages get deleted in bulk.
Lately, mobile companies have upgraded their SMS application UI also to make it look attractive and engaging with the logo of the brand appearing to the sender providing a more attractive view of the SMS box.
Check out how Starbucks reaches out to its clients with custom text messages and a web link offering details on their promotional offer. SMS has become a sure-shot way to communicate on a condition that the receiver of your SMS trusts or at the least knows you. Random SMS’s don’t enjoy the same privileges.
As per news reports, the A2P segment has grown 20% every year since 2014 to 210 billion messages in 2018 and is expected to reach 265 billion in 2019. Five years ago, the number was less than 100 billion.
A2P SMS has been accepted unanimously across industries be it alerts and OTPs from Banks, Subscriber info in offline retail, One-time-password confirmations from online retail, delivery info from food apps, Flight/ Railways information details, etc. The types of SMS range from transaction alerts to notifications to marketing.
As people adopted digital transactions and started using apps for their various needs SMS comes to the rescue for validation and authorization for such digital engagement. As the volume model of SMS drastically declined from person-to-person messages in India the rise in app-to-person messages has done wonders by adding value to the whole game. Indian telcos charge the app companies around 10 paise per message within India and Rs 1 for international ones. With revenues falling from such B2B associations, the SMS business can be termed as SOS for the telecom sector which is under heavy financial stress amid stiff competition.
To sum it all, SMS is a one-sided love affair. One-sided love is beautiful. No expectations. Nothing in return. You can never tell them to go away, because you don’t have any control over them (their feelings). It’s beautiful.