SMS Marketing – The Pitfalls of this Marketing Strategy

SMS or short message service marketing became increasingly popular in the early 2000s.

This marketing strategy had a lot of benefits and advantages that soon it became a legitimate advertising channel especially for those who run small business firms and companies. But slowly the pitfalls and negative aspects of this marketing strategy came to the front and today; its popularity is rapidly diminishing.

Since there is very less cost and investment in this type of marketing, companies send out thousands of advertisements via SMS to the mass market. This has led to strong disapproval from most of the people as they get irritated and annoyed at being disturbed so often with random and useless messages. Most companies tend to overlook the personal details and send messages to a large group of people without stopping to think if the advertisement is going to be useful to them. And the result; constant buzzing of the phone which irritates the mass and makes them develop a strong dislike to this kind of marketing.

SMS marketing, if not carried out effectively, can cause serious damage to a company or brand as it elicits different kinds of negative responses in customers. Most often, customers are not given the information on how they can stop receiving these advertisements if they are irrelevant to them. This makes the recipients think that no one is controlling the process inculcating negative feelings.

SMS providers often provide business owners the ability to import their customers’ numbers without their permission. This has led to the misuse of this marketing strategy where spam messages have become the order of the day. The irritation of the recipients has risen to the point where no one even bothers to read the messages even though some of them might be relevant and beneficial. SMS marketing has only advocated and popularized the use of the ‘delete’ button among consumers today.