Telemarketers tear up as Telcos hike commercial bulk SMS fees by 25-30% from next month

New Delhi: Telemarketing expenses for enterprises are set to soar from next month with telecom operators increasing commercial bulk SMS charges by 25-30% — the largest hike ever — following the implementation of blockchain technology to check spam.
Tata Communications, Videocon, Route Mobile, ACL Mobile, ValueFirst, Gupshup and almost 50,000 telemarketers, third-party aggregators and resellers of messaging services who pay 9-10 paise/SMS to telcos now will be hit by an additional charge of 2.5 paise/SMS.

“This is a fairly steep hike by telcos and may directly impact marketing budgets in almost every sector such as banking, retail, ecommerce and delivery apps that send millions of transactional, promotional and service messages to their customers every day,” said Anurag Aggarwal, director — messaging services at Tata Communications.

About 1 billion SMSes are sent out every day in India, of which 60-70% are transactional in nature and the remainder is promotional, Aggarwal said.

“Due to the added cost, ultimately, brands may either cut down their promotional traffic or — depending on cost viability — explore other feature-rich OTT platforms such as WhatsApp Business Messaging to send personalised marketing content,” he added.

The additional charge is to cover the cost of operators in using blockchain technology to check the flow of unregistered SMSes and content over their networks and to ensure that the do-not-disturb preferences of customers are not violated.

Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea didn’t respond to ET’s emailed queries. Small telemarketers said the move is a “death knell” for them and similar enterprises that are increasingly dependent on tele-advertising in the midst of Covid-19.