Recent Trends in Commercial Text Messaging

LONDON, May 11, 2010 - Businesses are increasingly turning text messaging services to
enhance new and existing customers' experience with their brand or service.
The main trends in commercial text messaging are promotional campaigns and
information services as well as notifications, alerts and reminders.

Engaging with customers

Promotional campaigns using text messaging aim at providing an
immediate and interactive experience with a brand via a consumer's mobile
phone. Many lifestyle brands and retail stores blend above-the-line (mass
media) and below-the-line (targeted) advertising and marketing strategies for
text campaigns.

These promotional campaigns take either a text push or text
pull approach. In a text pull campaign a promotional competition, voting
line, customer satisfaction research, or in-store campaign is used to attract
customers' attention. The call to action is an incoming number service to
which customers send their text and receive an automated reply.

A text push campaign is where promotional messages are sent by
a business to a specific customer demographic. These customers have given
explicit permission to receive text messages from the company and expect to
be kept updated on promotions, product launch events and the arrival of new
stock.

Scheduling appointments

Service industries rely on managing client's appointment times
to ensure the smooth running of a business - whether it's a medical or dental
practice, a wellness clinic, or sales representative on the road. In these
and other cases, text messaging is increasingly becoming the standard way of
confirming appointments and sending out appointment reminders a day ahead of
a scheduled appointment.

Promoting properties

Text messaging also provides benefits for estate agents. They
use text messaging as a convenient way to communicate with prospective buyers
by sending them information about a new property on the market. If a buyer is
interested in viewing the property then can respond via text or call the
agent.

Another way estate agents have taken up texting is in using
incoming numbers when advertising properties. A prospective buyer is able to
respond to the advert by sending a text to incoming number service to make an
enquiry or make a booking to view the property.

Text is best

Businesses using text messaging are finding that the fast
delivery of succinct messages to targeted consumers and the ability of text
messaging to initiate a conversation with new customers helps in reducing
their communications costs when it comes to marketing and advertising spend.

About BulkSMS.co.uk

BulkSMS.co.uk is service run by Celerity Messaging UK Ltd, a division of
Celerity Systems (Pty) Ltd. The company has offices in Crawley, West Sussex.

BulkSMS.co.uk is a leading wireless application service provider offering
bulk text messaging solutions to large and small businesses, schools, third
sector organisations, and individuals. BulkSMS.co.uk offers two-way text
messaging to support clients' business communication (notifications, alerts,
customer relationship management, etc), information services (weather,
financial markets, etc) and mobile marketing campaigns. BulkSMS.co.uk's
flagship product is the BulkSMS Text Messenger, a desktop application that
allows you to send messages from an Internet-enabled computer.

For more information about BulkSMS.co.uk's services visit
www.bulksms.co.uk.

For direct enquiries please email sales@bulksms.co.uk or contact the
company telephonically on +44(0)845-40-30-767.

For direct enquiries please email sales at bulksms.co.uk or contact the company telephonically on +44(0)845-40-30-767.