Texts.com announced a new on-line service for international texting and SMS marketing. The idea is to make it much easier and cheaper for PC users to send international texts, and for small businesses to run SMS marketing campaigns.
Texts.com is providing small businesses with the option to lease a shared short code, from $99/month. This includes one keyword (e.g, “Seafood”, “Vancouver Condo”, or “New York”) to be used on one shared short code service as well as 500 SMS per month.
For international texting, Texts.com charges as low as $0.10 for an SMS sent from a PC to an international mobile. Texts.com covers 198 different countries, with the same pricing across the board.
From the release:
“While mobile advertising is booming, it has not been an affordable or easy medium for the average small or local business to add into their marketing mix. Texts.com is introducing two new services that plan to change this for the North American market, making SMS Marketing an affordable and effective marketing strategy for small businesses” said Texts.com spokesperson, John Lyotier
What we think?
This doesn’t seem to be part of the growing trend for giving SMS away for free that we’ve seen of late. While the service does promote cheaper texting, it still monetises each SMS on one-by-one basis. While the idea of seeing international texting done quickly and cheaply is nice, I can’t help but feel that this service will flounder on it’s own. If it were integrated at carrier-end then it would be a whole lot more useful.
