(Hint: The Increase in cost isn't the only reason)
In the early 2000s, SMS marketing started in India. At that time a marketing SMS used to cost 1 paisa. But then like any marketing channel that starts working, everyone wanted to get on it & SMS communications started growing from bank notifications to real estate spam.
To curtail the growth of spam, TRAI increased the prices of an SMS ~10x in the early 2010s. When that didn’t work TRAI again hiked prices in May 2018. But that didn’t stop marketers from bombarding customers with SMS either, so finally in 2020 TRAI introduced DLT, a blockchain technology to prevent misuse of SMS. On top of that, TRAI just increased SMS costs by 2.5paisa too, which will further increase the cost of an SMS by 25% to 30%.
"TRAI wants to reduce SMS marketing because customers don’t want to receive SMS. Just think about it, don’t you get irritated when your phone buzzes in the middle of your workday with a marketing SMS."
But it’s not just TRAI that’s moving in that direction. It’s the apps on your phone too. Just like Google introduced the promotions tab that reduced email open rates, SMS apps on our phones today are hiding SMS in a secondary tab.
On top of that, the SMS apps are making it easier than ever before to report spam for an SMS.
As the algorithms on these SMS apps get stronger, ultimately we’ll stop getting notified for promotional SMS completely. We might hate this trend, because we’ve been so reliant on SMS for so many years for our CRM marketing, but I’ve noticed over the years that once a big trend starts it can’t be stopped. The government authorities & lots of large companies are spending lots of money to kill SMS spam & over time they will succeed.
“The underlying trend is simple. Everyone from TRAI to the apps on your phone want to make SMS spam disappear”
We might hate this trend, because we’ve been so reliant on SMS for so many years for our CRM marketing, but I’ve noticed over the years that once a big trend starts it can’t be stopped. The government authorities & lots of large companies are spending lots of money to kill SMS spam & over time they will succeed.
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