SMS the language of 6 billion people

SMS: the language of 6 billion people
Chapter 2. The rise of A2P SMS
When it was all about email
When email first became available, offering the content and flexibility of sending a hard copy in the
post, yet as fast as a fax, without the loss of quality, it seemed the ultimate business communication
tool. But then malicious email followed, and suddenly, emails could arrive on your desktop with
attachments that could harm your computer if you opened them. And in just a few short years, we have
now reached a point where approximately 70 percent of all email sent worldwide is spam.
In business, email is still a tool that most of us use every day, but now response times are often
measured in days and weeks, not minutes and hours. Email has been saturated, mobbed, hijacked.
Commercial spam, and the ceaseless filtering and blocking technologies designed to beat it, have
ruined this once world-leading messaging platform.
Today, we only trust email from individuals we know, we are all tired of opening endless marketing
emails, and we are overwhelmed by marketing messages that, frankly, look like marketing messages.
There are lessons to be learned from this story of email.
Get personal
By contrast to email, SMS is still comparatively spam-free, and so far carriers around the world, in most
countries, are doing a great job of keeping high levels of spam out of SMS networks. What sets SMS
apart from email, is cost. Broadly speaking, it costs almost nothing to spam millions of people by email,
but there is a price attached to spamming people by SMS and, while that price is there, it acts as a
barrier to high levels of ineffective and annoying spam.
The biggest factor that truly sets SMS apart from email is the device, the fact that SMS delivers to a
mobile phone, giving SMS a degree of personalisation that email has never achieved. All around the
world, consumers have developed a level of personal attachment to mobile phones that has never been
seen before in consumer electronics. This level of attachment has given SMS a deeply personal
appeal, and open rates and response rates are amazingly high compared to email and other forms of
communications.
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