Bulk SMS vs. WhatsApp Messaging – Which One Provides Better ROI?

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sms vs whatsapp for business comparison

In the past decade, the growth of WhatsApp has been phenomenal. WhatsApp has become arguably the most popular instant messaging app in the world.

Today, WhatsApp plays a more and more important role in daily communication in our lives.

However, when it comes to marketing, does it generate the expected marketing results?

In fact, there are still business owners that frequently use Bulk SMS to reach out to their customers and effectively convert via promotional messages. 

Now the question is, can businesses use WhatsApp messaging to reach out to customers and generate similar results?

Let’s dive into the details, explore the marketing potential of Bulk SMS & WhatsApp, and try to understand which offers a better ROI.

Bulk SMS outreach is almost universal; WhatsApp messaging outreach is limited

Bulk SMS marketing helps business owners to outreach unlimited audiences.

You can easily tap into new audiences with Bulk SMS marketing.

There are no limitations on the number a marketer can send to its target audience.

However, if you use WhatsApp, you’ll be limited to 256 recipients only whenever you send a “broadcast”.

Bulk SMS has a lower barrier of entry; Whatsapp has higher opt-in requirements

Bulk SMS has a low barrier to entry. Businesses can get customer contact lists by extracting customer information who have carried out transactions with them, and use this method to populate their SMS contact database.

With WhatsApp, the users will have to explicitly opt-in into a business list.

Users can mark your messages as “spam” and delete your message if you are not in their contact list.

Reaching customers via WhatsApp sometimes looks like a violation of the recipient’s privacy. While with Bulk SMS, it’s not usually referred to as a violation of privacy.

SMS feature is pre-installed on every phone; WhatsApp must be installed by users manually

With Bulk SMS, marketers can reach all end users because each handset comes with a pre-installed SMS feature. Users do not need to install any software at all on their end.

However, when it comes to WhatsApp, users must install it on their device manually.

If a marketer wants to know whether the recipient has WhatsApp activated on the device or not, the only way is to add the recipient’s contacts one-by-one, refresh WhatsApp, and check whether the new contact has WhatsApp installed on his/her device.

It’s certainly a long and dull process to go through, and it is not practical if you want to market something at scale.

SMS as One-time Password (OTP); WhatsApp does not support features like this

As online security is getting more and more important, having a double authentication is now consider as a basic security features for websites that holds a lot of sensitive personal information.

That is where SMS One-time Password or SMS OTP being one of the popular security features to implement.

It is simple, straight forward and provides another level of security to users, it helps the system to confirmed on your identity by verifying on the device that you are holding, besides your login details.

It can be easily implemented using API to trigger an SMS OTP to users who are interacting with your website.

However, WhatsApp does not provide any kind of API for public that is able to perform such action.

Cost

The price of SMS continues to drop, and you can still get discounts when you purchase in bulk.

The pricing of WhatsApp message for business seems to be more expensive than SMS now. 

Conclusion 

For all the reasons above, marketers can tell that Bulk SMS marketing is definitely a better option.

By using Bulk SMS, marketers can conduct marketing campaigns efficiently and timely.

If you are interested in Bulk SMS, make sure to check out Exabytes Bulk SMS Marketing service!

We provide Bulk SMS marketing service that is reliable, low cost, and we can help you deliver bulk text messages worldwide.