Frustrated consumers are becoming immune to many SMS marketing techniques…
due to spamming and other overuse techniques – leading marketers who use this method to wonder what the future holds for this type of market communication.
Though SMS marketing has not been around for a long time when compared with other forms of advertising, branding, and promotions, it has rapidly come to the point that consumers are frustrated with it and are no longer paying attention to a large percentage of the messages that they receive. Due to spamming and other methods that have swamped consumers on a regular basis, they have become just as immune to them as they are to the same techniques that fill their email junk folders.
Consumers, advocacy groups, and legal campaigns are building the pressure to close out SMS marketing altogether. The simplest of the solutions to achieve this would be to eliminate short codes. Regardless of what is being advertised or offered, how frequently, or if it has been specifically requested by the mobile user, carriers can begin to cut off short code access, simply using numerical order as their guides, beginning with 50001 and moving onward until they have all been stopped.
Unfortunately for marketers who are using SMS more ethically and using more consumer-friendly techniques such as opt-in, there are very few people out there speaking on behalf of SMS marketing, especially when compared to those speaking against it. This may mean that actions that start to shut it down could begin in the near future.
The only solution to the problem, according to some experts in the field, would be for SMS marketers to eliminate spam and save their own industry before they, themselves, are the cause of its destruction.
