Go back to school with SMS from Plivo

03 Sep 2021

Go back to school with SMS from Plivo

Hey, Mr. Retailer, is back-to-school time an important shopping period for your business? We hope the season is going well for you this year — and we know a way to make it better in the future.

Plivo commissioned The Harris Poll to conduct a survey in August among more than 2,000 US adults aged 18 and older. We found that nearly 9 in 10 Americans (87%) are open to receiving communications from retailers they shop or want to shop with, and the percentage was even higher — 94% — among US adults who planned to do back-to-school shopping.

How do you reach all of those consumers, who have money that they’re already planning to spend — somewhere — on clothing, school supplies, dorm furnishings, and personal electronics? The best way to communicate with current and potential customers is through SMS text messaging. Consider these statistics from TechJury:

75% of people are open to receiving offers via SMS.
66% of Americans check their phones 160 times a day on average.
SMS has a 98% open rate.
More than 60% of people read their SMS messages within five minutes.

All of those statistics show that text messaging is a tool you can’t afford to ignore.

We dived a little deeper into the results of our Harris Poll survey and found that about 3 in 4 (74%) US adults surveyed would opt in to receive text messages from retailers, primarily for shipping and delivery notices and updates (45%) and coupons (43%). The results varied a bit with the age of the consumer; younger adults were more likely to opt in to any messaging, and adults ages 35-44 were most likely to opt in for sales promotions.

CPaaS and APIs FTW

While businesses may see the value of adding text messaging to their applications, they may be baffled about where to start. The answer is a cloud-based communications platform, also known as communication platform as a service (CPaaS), that provides a set of APIs that your developers can use to add the ability to send and receive messages to your existing applications.

Of course CPaaS platforms vary, so to take advantage of the power of SMS, you should look for a communications platform with a reliable network of high-quality carriers, a presence in every market you serve (with local phone numbers), and a simple, well-documented API that makes it easy for developers to add SMS messaging to your applications. Plivo not only provides all that, we walk our customers through the complex world of regulatory compliance for things like sending rate limits, data privacy, and sender ID regulations. Put all of that together and you can see why Plivo is the top cloud communications platform in customer satisfaction on G2.

That all sounds good, but we know you won’t be convinced until you see for yourself. That’s why we’ve written use case guides for common tasks like sending SMS messages that show you and your developers exactly how to implement more than a dozen common business tasks, with coding examples in seven common development languages. You can test any and all of them for free by creating a free Plivo account.

If you’re not already using SMS to communicate with your market, your customers aren’t the only ones who need to go back to school. We’ve got some interesting study aids for you. You can read about the power of using SMS for marketing. We’ve also written awhite paper on how to optimize your SMS communications, and an SMS best practices guide for more insights and tips. If you have questions on other topics, we encourage you to talk to one of our experts. They can help you pass SMS 101 with flying colors.

*This survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Plivo from August 10-12, 2021 among 2,082 U.S. adults ages 18 and older, of whom, 688 plan to shop for back to school this year. For complete survey methodology, please contact press@plivo.com.