February 2009
Texts.com has announced the immediate availability of a new website and service enabling international text messaging and sms marketing services. The company's mandate is to simplify international text messaging, SMS marketing, and mobile advertising, making it easy to use and affordable for everyone to send texts worldwide.
SMS marketing and mobile advertising has proven to be one of the most effective and affordable marketing mediums, and in contrast to traditional advertising spending, mobile marketing is on a considerable upswing.
According to eMarketer, mobile advertising spend in the US is projected to surpass $6.5 billion by 2012, a growth of 650% over five years.
"While mobile advertising is booming, it has not been an affordable or easy medium for the average small or local business to add into their marketing mix. Texts.com is introducing two new services that plan to change this for the North American market, making SMS Marketing an affordable and effective marketing strategy for small businesses," said Texts.com spokesperson, John Lyotier.
Texts.com is providing small businesses with the option to lease a shared short code at rates starting at $99/month. This mobile advertising service includes one keyword (e.g, "Seafood", "Vancouver Condo", or "New York") to be used on one shared short code service as well as 500 SMS message credits per month.
As an alternative to leasing a shared short code, Texts.com is beta testing a new mobile advertising service presently called "Call-to-Subscribe" which allows local businesses to build mobile marketing campaign lists by having interested parties call a dedicated local phone number rather than sending a text message. This subscription method overcomes the barriers identified by Mediamark Research Inc. who noted in 2006 that while 72% of all consumers can open a text message sent proactively from a marketer, far fewer (only 47%) knew how to send texts via an SMS Short Code.
The International Text Messaging side of Texts.com is targeted towards the growing global demand for sending SMS text messages to friends and family overseas. This includes international students and workers living within the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia, for example, and needing to keep in touch with those at home– wherever their homes might be.
With mobile penetration at much higher levels than the PC (with estimates as high as 3-to-1 based on Gartner research), many PC-connected users cannot send email to family and friends. Likewise, international calling rates are too high for many users. These same users, however, can send an SMS text message to that user's mobile device, enabling global communication and commerce.
While many large wireless carriers enable international text messaging from mobile devices, the cost for sending texts internationally is significant to those who are not on international messaging plans. Texts.com charges as low as $0.10 per message for SMS texts sent from a PC to a mobile phone. Texts.com allows users to send texts to 198 different countries, with each country costing the exact same low texting price.
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