Thanks,
Sanjay

As you know, our company provides SMS services to agencies on a wholesale basis. We are constantly asked about this. For years now we have tried to figure out if SMTP was worth it or not as it is “free” versus “per message cost”. i2SMS has passed along similar information in your post to those that ask, and we continue to ask other SMS companies about their experiences with SMTP because we believe the client deserves a solid answer.

What we can tell you and your readers is we have had multiple clients come to us and report that in sending SMS campaigns via SMTP they have had less then 60% hit the end user. We have no proof of this other then this is what our clients are telling us. Honestly, experienced SMS campaigners are not using SMTP best we can tell. We will continue to monitor SMTP to see if this changes in the future.

We (i2SMS) considered building out a SMTP portal for our customers that wanted to try this service over a year ago. The software would be easily attached to our portal. We could easily charge a much lower cost to offer this service as we wouldn’t have the global aggregator’s fees and short code fees involved. However, we continue to hear companies that use this are not happy with the end result. Therefore, it would do us more harm to offer this as we believe we would end up with clients that were not happy, thus making it possible to have negative comments about our company and software. Realize that in this scenario we would warn the client about a lack of consistency, but in the end, the failure of the messages to be delivered would fall on our shoulders.

For us, the answer is simple. If you are just sending out a massive amount of messages and you do not care if 40% or so do not reach the end user, then SMTP is a cost effective way to market. There are a multitude of companies that can do this for you economically. However, if you want the messages to hit 98% of the end user’s phone, then you need to be using SMPP.

We wish there was a more cost efficient way to send out SMS messages. The truth, at least for now, is that SMTP is just not delivering in the end. Possibly for small campaigns with messages here and there. But certainly not for the larger campaigns where agencies are being held to ROI numbers…

I am sure as soon as I hit the “submit” button below some of your followers will answer that they ARE having successful campaigns using SMTP. I am not trying to challenge their successes. What I am reporting is that we have customers coming to us and now paying for messages to be delivered ‘after’ they tried SMTP and were not successful in their campaigns. Over time, the SMTP protocol has not been met with overall success.

We continue to believe that 2009 will see many changes in charges being allocated by the carriers and global aggregators in the SMS and MMS industry. We believe that a balance will be met so all will find an equitable mix of revenue and palatable cost to the marketers.