SMS marketing firm, Textlocal, will send over one billion opt-in SMS messages to customers worldwide by the close of 2017 – smashing its forecasted growth targets for the year
With its international technical headquarters located in Malvern’s Science Park, Textlocal was founded by Alastair Shortland in 2005 after receiving a text message from a nightclub advising that he had an unpaid bill.
Believing SMS to be the most effective form of marketing - considering the then predicted growth of mobile devices - Mr Shortland dedicated his time to learning code and web development, and built the bespoke Textlocal SMS Marketing platform.
It’s a service that has helped over 165,000 businesses directly engage with their target audiences.
This exponential growth has come as more and more firms are waking up to the benefits of SMS marketing, with Textlocal consistently improving its already sophisticated platform by implementing new functionalities such as mobile ticketing, chat and campaign tracking.
These functionalities have helped the firm secure two national marketing awards, impressing judges in late 2016 with successful, high impact campaigns for retailer John Lewis and Lookers Motor Group, with the latter receiving an impressive return-on-investment of 4000 per cent for SMS marketing spend.
Mr Shortland said: “Textlocal has grown significantly over the past 12 months alone, with UK staff numbers rising from 30 to 50, together with expansion overseas into India and Myanmar, with five other key locations firmly in sight for 2018.
“Despite this exciting growth, I am still stunned by the millions of businesses who do not utilise SMS marketing to engage with their customer base.
“Particularly when you consider statistics from our latest research that there will be nearly 45 million opt-in mobile phone users who would like to hear from brands or businesses via SMS – compared with 30 million registered Facebook users, of which a massive 91 per cent advise they do not want to be targeted by brands or businesses via the social media platform.” he said.
