In 
SMS is increasingly become popular as a medium to reach out to customers both present and prospective. We talk to one the pioneers of Free SMS and SMS advertising to know more about how business are utilise SMSes to further their business goals. Satya Kalyan Yerramsetti, Founder and CEO, SMS Country.
Q. What are the services that you offer to you enterprise customers?
We provide tools and platform to send bulk messages, or SMS alerts for various enterprises. For instance, when you book a ticket or do some transaction on your credit card, you receive a message (alert). This is something which we enable. Though we are also into SMS advertising, it is not our core focus area. Also, we do offer free SMS service which enables users to send free SMSes of 80 characters and the rest 80 characters are used to send sponsored messages. We started 160by2 in 2007 because there was a huge need of free SMS both by end users and enterprise customers to send advertisements without intruding into privacy. DND was one of the main reasons. So we thought of this platform which helps us create obtained data base for enterprise customers.
The idea is you send a message for which you don't need to pay. So 80 characters are free for you while the rest is advertisement which is also contextual and these SMS can be so contextual that if you send a message like 'Congratulations', the advertisement will be from Cadburry saying 'kuch meetha ho jaye'.
Q. What are the business segments that use your service the most and what is the share of SME clients in that?
Our major clientele includes mainly financial sector for SMS alerts. In the SME segment also financial sector forms the biggest chunk, besides stock brokers, insurance agents etc use our services. Retail is another big segment who use our services for there loyalty programs, discount alerts etc. SME segment is very lucrative and we plan to expand our base in this segment but awareness levels among SMBs is low which is a cause of concern for us and we are addressing that. 160by2 is more broad based with all kinds of businesses sending advertisement using this platform.
It is especially beneficial for SMEs as it helps them reaching target customers in a specific geography, and at a very affordable price.
Q. How are you planning to tap Indian enterprises?
A. We plan to expand to 40 cities compared to current 10, this year, which would help us reach out to them. Besides, we plan to increase our manpower strength to 400 in our sales team to take our service to this segment. SMEs have been demanding Voice SMS and local language SMSes as their customers are at times illiterate or don't understand English or Hindi. Launching our services in local languages is in our pipeline which will be another step in broadening our reach. We are also expanding in middle east GCC countries to target in the Indian diaspora and local population as well.
Add new comment