RCS Business Messaging: Getting Started

Your audience wants more than basic text interactions sometimes...

SMS is great! But it has its limitations:

• It only allows plain text
• It only allows 160 characters per message

MMS does allow you to attach a media file and increases character limits - but that's the extent of the options available via traditional texting methods.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have freedom to send more interactive text messages, to help encourage your audience to engage even more?

That’s why we’re excited to announce that RCS will soon be available to Mobile Text Alerts users!

In this article we’ll walk you through some of the features, benefits, and use cases you’ll be able to take advantage of via RCS.

Why Use RCS? (Benefits)

RCS gives you more expanded messaging options than SMS or MMS.

That way, you’re not limited to the narrow capabilities of traditional texting.

This opens up more possibilities for your team as you look for ways to expand how you engage with your audience - and how you try to get them to engage with you.

That means you can:

• Encourage more interaction with your audience with longer messages and more visual appeal
• Guide your audience to more defined CTAs that support your campaign goals
• Be more informed about how your audience is engaging (via features such as read receipts and typing indicators)
• Have better brand awareness for your audience as you can include brand info with your RCS sending profile

And when you can give your messages more interactive appeal - and therefore get better engagement - what’s likely to follow?

• More conversions
• Less customer friction
• More trust and familiarity with your brand

What Is Possible with RCS? (Features)

RCS opens up the following features (among others)…

Read receipts and typing indicators

These help give you insight into how your audience is engaging with your message, so you can have confidence that people are not only receiving but actually seeing your messages.

(And you can even see if they’re trying to send a message back!)

Suggested replies and actions

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Suggested replies and actions allow you to pre-fill actions you’d like your audience to take - all they have to do is tap the option they’d like to do.

Which makes it really easy to guide people to your desired CTA!

Some of the options you can suggest include:

• View location
• Share location
• Dial a number
• Open URL
• Create calendar event

Brand info

Your RCS “agent” (or sender) includes your brand info - which helps your brand awareness as your recipients can easily see who you are and find out more about you.

Your RCS profile can include your brand name, logo, phone number, website, email, and a banner image.

The inclusion of brand info also means, of course, that your recipients will be able to tell right away who the message is coming from. This could increase the chances that they’ll open the message (since they’ll recognize the sender).

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Rich cards

“Rich cards” are interactive “cards” you can include in your messages that can contain images, title text, description text, suggested replies, and suggested actions.

These can also be presented in a carousel format if you prefer to have multiple cards within one message.

This lends to a very “rich” and interactive experience for the people receiving your message.

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How Can You Use RCS? (Use Cases)

The use cases for RCS are as limitless as text messaging in general.

Any scenario you can think of in which you’d want to engage with your audience with an interactive message is an opportunity for RCS.

Here are a few brief examples…

• Retail/ecommerce – could include product images for a promotion and a clickable suggested action to open a URL and purchase
• Appointment- or booking-based services – could include an appointment/booking confirmation with an option to create a calendar event
  • Healthcare
  • Hospitality
  • Service-based businesses
  • Travel
• Fintech or financial services – could include a notice about suspicious activity and ask whether the activity was legitimate
• Events – could include details about an event and an “Add to Calendar”

Getting RCS going for your business

RCS is more and more becoming the messaging option of choice for personal interactions - and it makes sense that businesses should adapt.

So Mobile Text Alerts is embracing this step into the future and giving you the opportunity to take advantage of richer messaging experiences, so that you can get the most engagement possible for your messages.

Why not try it out for yourself?

Get your free Mobile Text Alerts account and ask about RCS today.