By Samuyl Joshi
Have you also encountered this awkward situation: expensive marketing SMS sent, users ignore it directly, or even automatically intercepted by phone system into "spam folder"? With customer acquisition cost (CAC) soaring, the era of "casting a wide net" with 160 plain text characters is over.
The core pain point enterprises now face is very intuitive: how to achieve rich interactions like WeChat mini-programs in a native entry that doesn't require users to download an APP? The answer is RCS Business Messaging, which is reshaping communication standards.
In the past few years, RCS was often criticized as "much thunder but little rain", but with Apple officially supporting RCS protocol in iOS 18, the last piece of the puzzle has been completed. Now, we don't talk about concepts, only how to use it to make money. Here are three practical points to improve conversion:
The biggest disadvantage of traditional SMS is that numbers look like garbled code (like 1069xxxx), making users very suspicious. The core advantage of RCS lies in RCS verified sender logo.
After certification through Google Jibe or operators, your message is no longer a string of numbers, but displays a clear brand name and blue official certification badge. This is not just for good looks, but more importantly for anti-fraud. According to GSMA data, messages with brand certification can increase user trust by over 75%. In financial and e-commerce scenarios, this sense of trust directly determines whether users dare to click that link.
Many overseas enterprises are torn between RCS business messaging vs WhatsApp Business. My suggestion is: WhatsApp is suitable for deep customer service, while RCS is suitable for marketing outreach.
RCS's killer feature is Native (native nature). Users don't need to download WhatsApp, nor add friends, as long as the phone has signal they can receive. Using RCS rich media cards (Rich Cards) and suggested reply buttons (Suggested Replies), you can directly display multi-image carousel products in the SMS interface, and even let users click "Buy Now" to complete payment. This "ready to use" experience greatly shortens the conversion path.
Previously, the biggest headache with RCS was only covering Android users. But now, layout for RCS on iPhone business has become a growth must-have for 2026.
Although RCS experience on iPhone is still being perfected, it already supports high-resolution image sending and typing status display. This means your marketing campaigns can finally achieve full coverage - Android users see rich media cards, iOS users receive high-definition graphics, not fall back to awkward plain text SMS.
This is not just talk on paper. Fast food giant Subway once conducted a famous A/B test on Benefits of RCS over SMS marketing.
They sent two groups of promotional messages to loyal members:
The results are staggering: RCS group's conversion rate was 140% higher than SMS group. More importantly, according to latest RCS open rates statistics, the interaction rate of this campaign did not decay over time, but because of good user experience, unsubscribe rate dropped significantly.
RCS is not a replacement for SMS, it's a "lightweight APP". When your competitors are still sending 70-character plain text, you've already put the shelf in users' SMS inbox.
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