MMS vs SMS Landing Page – the battle on adding images to SMS campaigns

For a long time if you wanted to add images to your SMS campaign, the only way to do that was via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). It was considered as a major enhancement to SMS when first introduced in 2002.Fast forward to 2018, and MMS messaging looks rather more limited on what it can offer, especially compared to tools like SMS Landing Pages, which also serves as the platform for brands to experiment with rich messaging.

MMS – the good, the bad and the ugly

The first SMS was sent in 1992; MMS came in 10 years later, supporting content formats like sound recording, videos and images. Even with the rise of social media and instant messaging, where sharing of images and videos is made very easy using the internet, MMS was still the preferred tool for some businesses for its direct and instantaneous delivery to recipients’ handsets, without the barrier of downloading any app, creating another account or ‘following’ any page.

Plain visual with no added features But MMS is not perfect and has many limitations. Even though MMS messages are visually appealing, they are at most, just posters or flyers that were sent to the mobile phones. It doesn’t entail any personalisation or interactive features that consumers nowadays have learnt to expect. Limited reporting & insights While it is great to be able to present your customers the complete message without the need to click through, it also means there’s only one way to measure the success of the campaign, thus providing very limited insights about the likes and dislikes of the recipients. Costly and unsustainableMMS is also very costly. Sending an MMS is about at least 3 times the cost of sending an SMS; together with the fees to hire a professional designer for every artwork, it quickly adds up and can become quite unsustainable for many brands.  

SMS Landing Pages – personalised mobile-first web pages sent via SMS  

SMS is on the cusp of being transformed to Rich Messaging Service (RCS). When the transformation finally takes place, we will be able to do far more than sending multimedia content within the native messaging app. But for now, we’ve introduced SMS Landing Pages as the stepping stone to RCS. With SMS Landing Pages, you’re able to enjoy the combined benefit of the high visibility of SMS, and the feature-rich flexibility of a mobile-first web page, resulting in a tool that has many more features than an MMS message can offer.

Images, offer codes, CTAs and company branding You can include things like brand logos, images, offer codes and call-to-action buttons to the SMS Landing Page, which is specifically designed for the mobile users to ensure a smooth and seamless experience, enhance interactions and improve conversions. Personalised content One feature that’s unique to Esendex SMS Landing Pages is the ability to personalise content with the use of dynamic fields. All you need to do is to upload a data file that contains all the variants to our Messaging Studio. Our system will automatically match that with the corresponding fields on the landing page, and produce a unique web page that feels like it is tailor-made for each recipient – without the need of a developer or additional code or software. Something that neither MMS nor a regular web page can do! Easy to use studio with customisable templates Time and design resources are often a struggle for many businesses; that’s why we’ve created an easy to use Messaging Studio and included professionally designed templates to help those who are short of time or resources to get a head-start. While MMS has served us for a good 16 years, it is time to move on to a more sophisticated product that satisfies both the needs of customers and businesses. SMS Landing Page is here for this purpose. If you would like to try it out, please contact us, we are happy to help you get started.