Exploring Business SMS: A Chat About Trends and Growth Strategies at SkySwitch Vectors 2024

The oft-typed acronym “TIL” (“Today I Learned”) can be used in a plethora of interesting ways. For example, “TIL that the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Reef estimates that, despite only covering 0.2% of the planet’s seafloor, coral reefs support at least 25% of marine species and the value of goods and services they provide has been estimated at $2.7 trillion per year.” Or, as another example, “TIL that, according to Cambridge Dictionary research, the Bechstein piano at London’s Trident (News - Alert) Studios was used to record several record-breaking hits over the years, including “Hey Jude” by The Beatles and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.”

Super neat, if you ask me.

And since you’re reading this on Internet Telephony (rather than, say, NatGeo or Rolling Stone), here’s an interesting “TIL” moment I experienced earlier this week while attending a conference session at SkySwitch Vectors 2024, the annual signature event for white-label UCaaS resellers that took place in downtown Nashville, Tennessee:

According to the session’s panel of UCaaS experts — SkySwitch Vice President of Revenue Christina Hyde, SkySwitch Channel Account Executive III David Shepherd and Partner Account Manager III Brian Krisukas, Unicom Solutions Head of Customer Service and Training Katherine Richards and ComTech Network Solutions (News - Alert) COO Ethan Farlow — I quickly became able to say the following:

“TIL that typically more than 95% of text messages are read within the first initial three minutes they’re received, texts achieve a click-through/call rate exceeding 36% on average, and 64% of all consumers prefer receiving promotions and coupons via text, rather than email or physical mail.”

So while that doesn’t cover, say, a nature documentary or an inside scoop about Paul McCartney, I’d bet that SkySwitch Vectors 2024 attendees found that information quite helpful, in its own way.

Here’s more of what we learned from the panelists during this session:

• Across both SkySwitch and fellow BCM One company CoreDial’s platform offerings, top common denominators when it comes to their SMS-related product offerings include SMS/MMS, contact management, shared numbers, campaigns (i.e. drip, blast), away messages and more.

• Additional features – these part of SkySwitch’s other cloud-centric offerings – include number sharing, canned responses, contact and list management, scheduled messages and reminders, and integrations with the likes of Teams, Google Meet, HubSpot (News - Alert) and plenty of others.

• SkySwitch also has its knowledge base, a trove of marketing asset resources, and editable SMS templates for teams looking to optimize their communications strategies even farther.

While the session did cover more functionalities and unlockable insights for propelling partners’ businesses forward, readers interested further can look to SkySwitch’s website by this upcoming August for announcements of 2025’s Vectors show. Stay tuned, and learn about the company’s stay-ahead-of-the-curve best practices there.