SMS vs. MMS: What’s Best for Your Show?

A few days ago, I received a MMS message for the MobileCON 2012 trade show (formerly CTIA Enterprise & Applications), October 9 – 11, at the San Diego Convention Center.

In this week’s post, I want to share some thoughts on multimedia messaging service (MMS) and how it differs from short message service (SMS), which has much more scale in the U.S.—2.3 trillion SMS messages were sent and received in 2011 vs. 52.8 billion MMS messages, according to the CTIA, The Wireless Association.

The MobileCON MMS contained a slide show with multiple photos, text and a link to the show website.

MMS enables you to deliver a much richer message, including video, audio, images and many, many more characters. With SMS you are restricted to text only and 160 characters.

MMS can also help you stand out and differentiate from the competition because of the much smaller number of MMS messages when compared to SMS.

Should you use MMS? Well, that depends on several variables…

Will your mobile marketing benefit from a richer media format, and do you have content i.e. images, video or audio that will enhance your messaging and help you increase conversion when compared to SMS? You may very well need to run some A/B tests to get the answers here.

Are you willing to spend more dollars to deploy MMS?

Do your audience’s mobile media habits support the need for MMS?

There are also technical issues regarding delivery of MMS, which don’t exist with SMS. These issues are beyond the scope of this post but you should speak with your mobile vendor so you can understand them, and factor them into your planning.

BOTTOM LINE: Understand the pros and cons of both SMS and MMS, and then use the one which is best for the job at hand.

Posted on August 23, 2012