SMS Advertising :: Business, Marketing

In past few years, SMS has a remarkable increasing involvement in marketing practice, it has been used with other traditional media, such as print advertising, television commercial or other broadcasting, to strengthen the efficiency of the campaign (Zhang and Mao, 2008). It was claimed that SMS itself enables to enlarge the campaign’s reach and effectiveness because of ability of interactive to create viral effect. Wohlfahrt (2002) explained that when receivers receive message, they then forward to further other people in their contact list, and it has been proven by Kroeber-Riel and Weinberg (2003) that those messages delivered by familiar senders were seen in more trustworthy than those sent from advertisers directly. In marketer’s perspective, messaging help increasing the rate of interaction from the receivers, because advertising with financial offers or promotion, will be sent to the consumers when they are actually shopping (Zoller et al, 2001). Plus, SMS itself allow the sender and receive interact immediately, so that mobile advertising will yield a direct and rapid response from the consumers (Boonmark, 2006). Moreover, mobile phones are ubiquity and convenience because they are very personal, and always kept within 1 meter of user’s body during the day time (Sirivastava 2004 and Haghirian et al., 2008). Therefore, SMS advertising allow marketer to reach consumers virtually any time and anywhere via their mobile devices (Boonmark, 2006). It helps marketer become closer to the consumer as mobile phone is communication which is a part of consumer’s daily lives (Forrester report, 2001). So that, information sent to mobile devices also tends to capture high attention from receivers because information is read completely and immediately after receipt. (Barwise and Strong 2002). SMS is also low cost medium compared to other type of direct marketing (e.g. telephone marketing, email marketing, direct mail) (Dickinder et al., 2004). SMS can capture tens of thousands consumer with a low budget compared (Leppanieni and Karjaluoto, 2005) There is variety of way which SMS has been used as a medium. Because SMS provide diversity of response capabilities such as message based responses, call based response, and mobile web landing page response (See Appendix D, MMA, 2009b), SMS is exercised to request for phone’s users engagement (Dickinder et al., 2004). To illustrate, SMS will be sent with the hyperlink allowing phone users to click to make a call (or click) to buy, to download, to vote, to contest or to win a prize. Boonmark’s studies (2006) found that messages were sent out with different kind of appeal, such as rewards, loves, and emotional appeal.