When implementing your outreach strategy, it’s important to use all the tools you have at your disposal. A strong brand, compelling creative, and multiple channels are all important ingredients to success. It’s also important to leverage emerging and innovative tactics that can give your outreach an advantage. That’s why we recommend exploring the benefits of using MMS marketing as part of your outreach strategy.

What Is MMS?

MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service. Compared with SMS, which can only send plain text, MMS lets you use images, GIFs, videos, and more. If you’ve ever texted someone a meme or a cat photo, you already know that MMS can add flavor to your personal messages. But why should you consider using MMS for your business?

Why Use MMS?

More Ways To Engage

The first benefit of MMS marketing is that it gives your audience another way to engage. We’ve talked before about the importance of using multiple channels to communicate with your audience. By catering to different consumer preferences, enterprises can unlock segments of their audience that would otherwise miss or ignore their outreach.

How does MMS help with this? Consider that the average person gets between 65 and 80 phone notifications a day, according to Duke University (Insider). While some people have no issue processing and prioritizing all this information, many feel overwhelmed and struggle to identify what’s important. For these individuals, including an MMS message with a branded image can help them recognize and prioritize your message. This makes your outreach more accessible, which is a win for customer experience and for your outreach performance.

Leverage Your Brand Awareness

Speaking of branded images, the ability to brand your texts is the second benefit of MMS marketing. Large enterprises spend millions on brand awareness advertising every year. If you are only saying your name in plain black and white SMS, you are missing a ton of leverage that your ads have already earned for you. Adding your logo and brand colors will help your audience instantly recognize your brand authority and feel more comfortable engaging with you.

Stand Out From the Scammers

Third, MMS is a powerful tool to help establish that your messages are credible. In a world where consumers are bombarded with scam and “smishing” messages every day, you want to make sure that they know your messages are legitimate. Starting a conversation with a branded image is a great way to clear away the uncertainty that people feel from unknown numbers. After all, very few scammers will invest in high-quality multimedia assets for MMS. Scammers are also deterred by MMS’ slightly higher sending costs.

Dare To Be Different

A fourth benefit of MMS marketing is simply its novelty. Even though MMS and SMS both reach the customer via their phone messaging app, MMS can be perceived as new and different when coming from brands. This is because MMS is still relatively rare. The most recent data places MMS at just 10% of texting traffic in the U.S. (FCC). So, your audience might be pleasantly surprised when they see an MMS message from you, which can make them pause and pay more attention. This is a psychological phenomenon known as a “pattern interrupt” and it can lead to increased engagement (Hubspot).

Picture This: Drips + MMS

Drips is launching MMS for select clients, bringing the benefits of MMS to an AI-powered conversational outreach strategy. We’ve seen really encouraging early results and have discovered some interesting use cases. Want to chat with us about it? Contact us!