A Small Business Guide to Text-Message Marketing

By Mark Cohen

From: The New York Times

Mobile text messaging, the same 160-character dispatches first popularized by nimble-fingered teenagers, may be the closest thing in the information-overloaded digital marketing world to a guaranteed read.

The use of text messaging, also called SMS (for short message service), has exploded in this country. Some 3.5 billion text messages are sent and received every day, according to CTIA, the wireless industry trade group. That is more than the number of cellphone calls and a threefold jump from 2007, with some of the biggest increases occurring in people over the age of 30.

Thanks to regulatory quirks, however, SMS is still a relatively uncluttered and spam-free marketing channel. It’s also the one form of communication that many people are tethered to 24/7. Which helps explain why, at a time when in-boxes fill with hundreds of never-opened e-mail messages from direct marketers, 97 percent of all SMS marketing messages are opened (83 percent within one hour), according to the latest cell-carrier research.

Continue reading here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/business/smallbusiness/24texting.html?_r=1