Social media is a tool that is very useful in today’s world.
Because of this, many people might have forgotten the importance of traditional SMS and MMS. Guess what? Multimedia messaging services are still essential today.
In case you are wondering how – you are in safe hands. This post will explain what multimedia messaging service marketing is and its benefits to your church. Ready? Let’s dive in.
What is Multimedia Messaging Service?
Almost everyone who uses a mobile phone has an idea of SMS, but not everyone knows about MMS. Well, MMS is simply an extension of SMS. The difference is that it allows you to send multimedia as part of your message content instead. Examples of multimedia include images, videos, and audio.
MMS was developed using SMS technology in 1984. The first country to fully harness the powers of MMS is China, and since then, several other countries have followed suit. Today, the multimedia messaging service traffic in the US and Europe has significantly increased. We owe this to the wide distribution of smartphones these days.
One of the significant advantages of MMS over SMS is that it has no standard limit. Here are a few statistics to show you why a multimedia messaging service is essential for your church:
- Open rates of about 98%.
- Click-through rates of above 10%.
- About 18 million are sent per minute worldwide.
Statistics show that the human attention span has dropped to about 8 seconds. This means that you need something more engaging than regular text to hold that attention for longer periods. With MMS, you can achieve this easily. Let’s check out some benefits of using a multimedia messaging service to your church.
Benefits of MMS to your Church
1. Better engagements
If you have been using SMS to publicize your church events before now with no results, it’s time to switch. You can achieve better engagements and more results with MMS. Why do we think so? Here are a few stats to help out:
- More than 65% of individuals will retain more information if it is paired with a picture.
- About 44% of individuals engage with content that carries visuals.
- Close to 66% of individuals find it easier to remember brands advertised via mobile the previous week.
This means that you can capture the attention of your audience better by using a multimedia messaging service. Why not switch to GIFs, graphics, audios, etc., for your messaging? Do this and check out the difference.
2. Helps you to say more
SMS limits what you can say to your customers. Even on social media, such as Twitter, you have limitations. Guess what? You can make use of up to 5000 characters in a single MMS message.
Let’s not forget that the human attention span has dropped considerably. This means that you shouldn’t still send very long messages just because you can using MMS. You must be considerate with your messages and straight to the point.
The benefit here is that it is easier to pass that long message across to your audience. On top of that, you can have images of animated GIFs to accompany the messages. This means that you can make your church communication better using MMS.
3. High penetration ratio
Almost every member of your congregation makes use of a smartphone. All smartphones support the use of multimedia messaging. It means that you can reach everyone in your audience conveniently.
Certain members of your congregation may not be active on social media. Well, with MMS, you can reach them. This service goes to their phones directly as long as they are on a mobile network.
If you have a church management software like ChurchPad, it makes it better. This is because you can send your messages directly from here.
4. Instant analytics
Wouldn’t it be nice to see the results of your “marketing efforts?” Analytics helps you to evaluate how you are doing in this regard. For example, it tells you how many messages were delivered and how many were opened.
This is very important to your campaigns as you need the results to improve your efforts further. With an efficient congregation management app like ChurchPad, you can easily check all these results.
Let’s say you are sending out messages to publicize an event. The analytics should give you a rough estimate of how many people have received your messages. This is because you can see how many messages were delivered and read.
5. Very affordable
Every organization works with a budget when it comes to marketing; churches are not left out. Most marketing channels cost you a lot of money because of subscriptions and ad sponsoring. Do you know that you spend far less when you use a multimedia messaging service?
MMS is a lot more interactive, and it is very affordable as well. This is why, even though it seems outdated, many churches are returning to MMS. With this channel, you can market your church at a minimal cost.
Conclusion
We don’t advise you to depend solely on multimedia message service for your publicity. However, it is a very effective way to reach your congregation. You can try using ChurchPad to handle your church MMS needs.