September 6, 2007

Email and Text Messaging Are Different Types of Communication Tools

In "Text Messaging VS E-mail Marketing," Gene Carr, founder and president of Patron Technology, argues that "text messaging is a transitional technology" and will be replaced by email. [via Danciti]

I think that Carr's position is incorrect on most counts.

First, email and text messaging (SMS) are two different forms of communication. For me, text messaging is great for sending and receiving short messages from people I already know. It answers basic questions about where are you now, what are you doing and related topics that can be dealt with in a sentence or two. Even though I can easily send and receive email from my Sprint phone, text messaging is still a faster form of communications in many situations.

Second, the type of information that I want to receive via SMS is different than what I want to receive via email. For example, I like receiving a weekly lists of dance performances via email--either from DanceMetro/DC or Dance/NYC. But I sure don't want to receive a long list of performances via text messaging, actually it's not possible. What I would like via text messaging are changes in scheduling and other details for specific dance performances that I am likely to attend or will attend.

So let's turn to Carr's points:

1) "The lines between e-mail and text messaging will blur."

Yes, you can send email messages and text messages from the same application. But users of each of these tools have different expectations of how they want to use them and the types of information they wish to receive. In addition to the points I made above, text messaging is a two-way communications tool (among people); email, especially in the case of email marketing, is a broadcast tool and primarily meant for one-way marketing that is intended to inspire a specific response or action.

2) "Text messaging is just text: Text messaging is limited - you can only send 160 characters (not words), and it's plain text. You can't send a complex message, or an attachment, or a picture or video. And, there's no formatting. Text messages can't be easily stored, forwarded or archived."

Limited functionality does not by definition equate with being useless or inferior. The beauty of text messaging is its limitations. Nobody wants to attach a video to a text message. That's not its purpose.

3) "Text Messaging Merely Got There First: If getting e-mail on your phone was really what everyone wanted in the first place, the reason it didn't happen was that the first generation of cell phones couldn't support the technology infrastructure needed."

I don't agree with this statement. For whatever reason text messaging was created, it still makes sense even with email access on the same device. SMS is for instant communications and email is often for non-instantaneous communications. I don't want to have to go through all of my emails on my phone to communicate with somebody via SMS. Maybe there's an elegant way to combine the two on the receiving end into a single application but this doesn't seem like a high priority to me.

4) "The price of text messaging is about $.08 to $.10 per message, to send AND the same cost to receive a reply. In a world in which most of our clients pay half to one tenth that rate to send an e-mail and pay nothing to get a response from a consumer, I think it's a marketing method with a lot sizzle, but not a lot of beef."

As I wrote above, different types of communications are optimal for email and SMS. So if you do let your clients receive notices by text messaging, you'll be sending different types of information. For example, you can send changes in schedules via SMS, as I mentioned above, and you can also send short special offers to people who want to receive them.

Whether SMS messages are more expensive or not, that is not the main issue. If somebody wants to receive a message from you as a SMS message, it means that they have a very high interest in what you offer and they are very likely to attend your performance or other arts event. So if it costs an extra 10 cents to get them to buy a ticket, it is worth it because your conversion rate will be very high.

But there are also ways to send free SMS messages. If you put your event calendar on Google Calendar, anybody can sign-up for text message notification. So if a dancegoer wants to track one of your upcoming performances, they can simply subscribe to it and indicate how they would like to be notified. Here's a screen shot from Google Calendar where you set your event reminder preferences:

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