Effective communication means your message is clear and concise and delivers the right idea about the service or product you are talking about. With rapid digitalization, the role of effective communication and marketing your services or products through proper channels becomes an utmost priority. Text message marketing takes the lead in building strong customer relationships, improving customer retention, and boosting sales. We will learn in this blog how many characters a text message can contain and how you can benefit from a text messaging website for your business growth.
What is an SMS?
SMS or Short Message Service is the most widely used mobile messaging or, as you may know, text message marketing. Email messages will likely be down in the span folders as potential customers have lesser readability. On the other hand, on average, text messages have a 95% open rate. With text messaging, you are sure many will see your message to potential customers compared to emails. People are always on their phones and like to respond better to text messages than email.
What is an SMS notification?
We all receive SMS notifications almost 24/7 on our mobile phones. SMS notification is a short text message businesses or organizations send to people to inform or educate them about updates, reminders, sales or discounts, and any relevant business-related news.
Benefits of SMS Notifications
Bridge, the gap between people – People are likely to spend more than three hours on their smartphones daily. It means you have a great chance to reach out to your audience and share your message.
Significant open rates – Text messages have a higher opening rate than emails; more than 95% of SMS notifications are opened.
Enable quick exchange of information – Customers read text message notifications within five seconds of receiving them on their phones.
Fulfill customers’ expectations – In most cases, customers expect to receive a text message notification from a business. It could be shipping details confirmation, an update on their order status, or a new sales alert. In the business world, this type of marketing is called transactional marketing.
Redirect customers to your website – You can add hyperlinks in SMS notifications which enables you to redirect people to visit specific product pages on your website.
Get better reach – Not all customers with smartphones have regular internet access. For this reason, your marketing messages from internet marketing platforms might not reach customers on time. SMS notifications are not dependent on internet access, which means you can reach your customers anytime when their phones are switched on.
Length of a standard text message
Sending a business message through a text messaging website requires some protocols. Typically, a single SMS message should have 160 characters and not more. Once you type in an SMS message and reach the character limit of 160, it will be counted as a single text message.
Beyond 160 characters, the mobile carriers will deduct seven characters from every message if you exceed the character limit. It happens because of a user-defined header that concatenates your messages, delivering them as one streamlined message. This process involves breaking down lengthy messages into single SMS, known as segments. Then the large SMS is shown to the receiver in a fluent form.
What do you mean by a character in a text message?
Characters include any letter, symbol, or number on a QWERTY keyboard. The latest trending emoji symbols do not count as a single character as they count as two characters. Unlike many services commonly used today, such as MMS and other data-driven services, SMS still works in the entire voice network. It is based on the big three GSM, CDMA, and TDMA network technologies doing it a universal service.
Apart from the standard text message length, for other alphabets, such as Chinese or Arabic, the maximum message length is limited to just 70 characters. Friedhelm Hillebrand was the person who suggested the 160-character length of a text message. He observed and tested the typical number of characters in an average sentence combined with a compromise on the average bandwidth at the time. Nowadays, messages can be quickly sent back and recompiled on the receiving mobile phone.
The SMS Standard
It defines what information is sent in a text message, what bits of binary code make up each letter, and how this data is organized so that sending and receiving phones can communicate. The actual data format of a message includes the length of the message, a timestamp, the destination phone number, and the actual message.
These details are described by the PDU (Protocol Description Unit), which comprises specific pieces of information in each text message.
Text message marketing has been a backbone for rapid text communication for decades. Businesses can easily reach out to potential customers, increase sales and build connections by smartly integrating a text message website for effective messaging campaigns.
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