Marketing is one of the most important departments for any business. Without a strong marketing platform, products and services do not catch consumers’ eyes and are not bought or used. Millions of dollars are spent on marketing. For example, to run a 30-second commercial during the 2017 Super Bowl cost, a company had to dish out 5 million dollars. Some companies might not have that kind of revenue stream or savings, but as one successful company shows, mass marketing might be as simple as a basic SMS message, or a text message.

Tinder: A SMS Message Success Story

In a recent podcast with Business Insider, Tinder CEO Sean Rad explained how he first got word out about the Tinder app. After the app’s creation and while brainstorming how to get word out to people, one of the people in the room gathered everyone’s phones and sent out texts about the app to 500 people. According to Rad, 80 percent of the people who received a text message signed up for Tinder. By the next day, the number of users had grown 50 percent. All that growth was stimulated by text messages, not a 5-million-dollar commercial campaign. And after a little more marketing strategy and a little time, the app grew into a nationwide success. Tinder now has over 10 million active users and is worth a few billions of dollars. And all of that grew from SMS messaging.

Using the Popularity of SMS Messaging to your Advantage

According to Digital Marketing Magazine, 5.1 billion people use a cell phone. With about 6.8 billion people on the planet, that means that the audience for SMS messaging is 75 percent of the world’s population. That is a huge potential audience for any organization that is smart enough to push marketing through SMS messaging.

But it is not just the size of the audience, but the efficiency that a text message provides for companies. For example, about 20 percent of emails are opened by those who receive them. With the amount of content that emails generally provide, it is safe to assume that people may open emails and not even read them or they just immediately trash them. Compare that to SMS messaging: 98 percent of SMS messages are opened. 98 percent! So not only do you have 75 percent of all humans receiving text, but you also have 98 percent of texts being opened and read. The simplicity and popularity of SMS messaging can be a major marketing opportunity.

A Simple Marketing Choice

When it comes to marketing, there should be no question about the value of SMS messaging. SMS marketing advantages include reaching an incredibly large audience with short, powerful push messages. As Tinder’s story reminds us, SMS messages to a large group of people can have a powerful effect on a product, business, or company’s popularity. What started as a simple text grew into a 3-million-dollar company. The choice of marketing strategy is simple: SMS messaging.