RCS vs SMS: What is the difference between the two for businesses?

How RCS is the next era of SMS marketing

News By Peter Bell published 14 January 2025

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Few other communication tools have as much reach as SMS. While we might only sporadically check emails and instant messages from our WhatsApp groups and other channels, the simplicity and universal nature of SMS means it has a wide array of use cases for businesses. Communicating about appointments, bookings, or an order’s delivery status, the personal nature of messages - and the fact we all have a device in our pocket to receive them - has long made it a powerful tool for brand-customer interactions.

Many consumers like SMS because they know it will work on any smartphone their family and friends are using. GSMA estimates we’ll see 6.3 billion mobile subscribers by 2030 – and with phones so integral to many of our lives, this represents billions of opportunities for businesses to engage with consumers wherever they are.

But while the first SMS was sent in 1992, little has changed about the technology in that time. Although we had MMS - ‘multimedia messaging service’ - as an evolution of SMS, users couldn’t send these messages particularly cheaply, so it didn’t take off in the same way as their online messaging platform successors. SMS is still resolutely text-oriented, and held back by various restrictions and a 160-character limit - hence the name ‘short messaging service’.

Despite SMS messages having very high open rates - as much as 98% - they therefore can lack the marketing sophistication of other platforms, impacting their engagement rates. With little scope for experimentation, businesses need an SMS alternative to make such marketing messages more useful, personalized, and engaging.

So, what comes next?

Peter Bell

VP of Marketing for EMEA at Twilio.

RCS: A revolutionary format

It all changed with the emergence of RCS - or ‘rich communication services’. As the name suggests, these advanced messages are rich with additional features, building on the original SMS format. RCS has been around for as long as 2008, but it has only been adopted by the main mobile platforms relatively recently, finally bringing it into the mainstream.

Apple, for example, adopted RCS in Messages with iOS 18 in September 2024, while Google also supports the technology via Android, even if a user’s phone carrier doesn’t. With already 1bn RCS users via Google Messages alone, and as many as 2.5 billion monthly active users and rising according to Omdia, RCS traffic is forecast to increase by more than a trillion messages year on year. Now is the time for brands to seriously consider this channel, especially given its advanced capabilities.

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