MMS
What is it?
MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service and is basically an upgrade to SMS (Short Message Service, or text messaging). MMS gives advertisers the capability to deliver multimedia content like photos, animation, video and audio. MMS may contain text with multimedia content, providing a more compelling marketing message.
MMS messaging is a great way for a variety of businesses to communicate with large groups of targeted customers, event attendees or employees. Banks can send customers account-specific messages to create a more convenient line of communication. Doctor's offices use MMS to remind patients of upcoming appointments, and schools use MMS messaging to get in touch with parents or students to inform them of school closures due to weather or school-specific events.
Political campaigns frequently use MMS and SMS, as 98% of the population has access to a mobile device that can receive multimedia messages. Studies show that MMS business marketing performs four to five times better than online advertising for increasing brand awareness. For this reason, MMS is the most effective form of direct marketing.
Send Your Ideal Audience a Variety Of Offers
CellForce has enabled its clients to reach users in many ways. Customers can be texted a keyword to receive a single, customized coupon or the business can mass send MMS mobile coupons to opt-in customers' mobile phone. You can offer discounts, buy one get one offers and more.
MMS coupons or promotions are messages sent to your targeted audiences that also offer them the latest products, services and upcoming offers. For example, an online event organizer can send an MMS message containing a bar code or QR code directly to event attendees' phones, to replace a printed ticket. Why tell people about your new dish when you can show it to them? A customer needs your address? Reply with the address and a picture or video of your business for easy identification.
Other MMS messaging options include sending prospective job seekers information about current vacancies, and guiding attendees through conferences and trade shows. It's also much less expensive to text a guest a map of a venue and a schedule of events than it is to print and distribute thousands of guides that get lost or forgotten – and ultimately thrown away.
The First Handset and System
The first commercially sold SMS service was offered to consumers, as person-to-person text messaging, in the early 1990s. Back then GSM mobile phone handsets did not support the ability to send SMS text messages. Nokia was the only handset manufacturer whose complete GSM phone line in 1993 supported user-sending SMS text messages.
Although Hillebrand and Ghillebaert laid the foundations for SMS messaging, it is the Finnish mobile communications engineer Matti Makkonen who is generally credited as the inventor of the SMS text message as we know it today. Makkonen was working for Nokia at the time and helped the company develop the first SMS friendly handsets.
Despite the multinational history of SMS, the first SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom in December 1992. It was sent by Neil Papworth of Sema Group using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone using an Orbitel 901 handset. The text of the message was a simple, festive “Merry Christmas.”
While texting is popular today, SMS messaging got off to a surprisingly slow start. In 1995, the average number of messages sent per customer per month was just 0.4. This was, however, largely due to operators rather than customers and restrictions in place on users and who they were able to send and receive messages from. For example, you could not send or receive messages from users outside of your network at that time. It wasn't until 1999 that an agreement was reached allowing users to send SMS messages to contacts using other networks.
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