Telemarketers use bulk SMS to market new products and services. One SMS costs only 9 to 10 paise and it might not feel like too much. But when that turns into a big number of messages every day, say 1,00,000 messages or more, then the costs pile up. To keep the expenses in check, companies plan and set up a marketing and advertising budget. But now, telcos have increased the price of bulk SMS fee by 25%-30%, according to a new report by ET Telecom. An interesting thing to note is that it is the largest hike ever by the telcos in bulk SMS fee. This is going to adversely affect the marketing budgets of big telemarketing companies. The new fee will be implemented from August, 2o2o.
Bulk SMS Fee Increased by 2.5 Paise
The reason behind implementing the price hike is the implementation of blockchain technology which will keep the spam messages in control. Some of the big telemarketers and third-party aggregators such as ACL Mobile, Videocon, Tata Communications, Gupshup, VlaueFirst, and other 50,000 such companies in the market are currently paying 9-10 paise for each SMS they send. But come August, these companies will have to pay an extra 2.5 paise for each SMS they roll out. This is going to affect the marketing budgets of the companies in a major way.
Anurag Aggarwal, Director of messaging services at Tata Communications said, “This is a fairly steep hike by telcos and may directly impact marketing budgets in almost every sector such as banking, retail, e-commerce, delivery apps etc who send millions of transactional, promotional and service messages to their customers every day.”
According to stats shared by Anurag Aggarwal, every day around a billion messages are sent in bulk in India. Out of which, almost 70% of the messages or SMS are transactional in nature while the remaining messages are promotional.
Due to the added cost, brands might be looking to save their money by going with OTT platforms which have a rich audience all year round. One way to do that would be to go with WhatsApp Business messaging platform which is a very good medium to send personalised messages to the customers.
