There is this funny thing that happens when you hand somebody your phone number. You have basically given them a seat at a very small table. Mom is at that table. Your sister is at that table. Your kid's school is at that table, usually with a message about an early dismissal you forgot about. So when a brand shows up in that thread, it is kind of a big deal, and honestly most marketers still treat it like a fancier version of email.
I sat down with Amanda McGucin Hager, CMO and CRO at TrueDialog, for another round on the Winners' Circle. TrueDialog just picked up another Sammy Award for SMS, which is their second trip to the podium with us, so clearly they are doing something right over there. What we talked about was not really SMS anymore, though. It was messaging, and the acronyms have gotten a little out of hand.
The Fear Keeping Brands Out of the Thread Is Mostly Imaginary
Amanda's team looked at the data behind more than a billion brand text messages, and the finding was pretty simple. People who opt in actually want the messages. That sounds obvious written down, yet it runs against what a lot of marketing leaders quietly believe.
"We hear sometimes in the market and sometimes on LinkedIn and in private dinners with other peers that people are somewhat scared and nervous to enter into the text messaging channel," Amanda told me. "But the reality of that data science is that it's actually just the opposite. If someone is opting in to hear from you, they are not turned off by your messaging. If anything, it was neutral at worst."
Neutral at worst is a genuinely useful benchmark. It means the downside risk everybody worries about is, more or less, imaginary. She published the full breakdown in Forbes, and the companion benchmarks report is worth a skim if you like your strategy backed by actual numbers instead of vibes.
I spent years in telecom watching channels get discovered, overloaded and abandoned, and this one is still early. That is rare.
RCS Turns a Text Into Something That Looks Like a Brand
Now here is where it gets interesting. RCS business messaging has quietly gone from a carrier standard nobody could use to something close to universal, and Apple's decision to support it finally dragged the US into the party. Adoption numbers moved fast after that, with projections landing near 3.8 billion monthly active users and one reported 500% jump in global RCS traffic right after the iOS rollout.
RCS stands for rich communication services, and the rich part is doing real work. You get images, video, swipeable cards, buttons that drop an appointment on somebody's calendar or open a map. Amanda's team built a no-code composer for it, which matters more than it sounds like it should.
"A number of vendors do it only through an API, which means as a marketing team or as a growth team, you're relying on your engineering support to help you craft that message," she said. "We built a no-code visualizer so that non-technical teams like marketing and sales can craft those messages and get them out."
Anybody who has ever waited three sprints for a landing page knows exactly why that is a relief.
The other piece of RCS is the verified sender. Your message does not arrive from a random ten digit number, it arrives from a contact card with your logo and your name on it. That is very hard to spoof, which is a nice property to have if you work in financial services or healthcare and your customers need to trust that an account alert is really yours.
Opting Out Is Not Always Spelled S-T-O-P
Text is a permission channel, so the opt-out is sort of sacred. The problem is that real humans do not read the compliance manual first.
Some people text STOP. Some people text "don't contact me again." Some people just send a stop sign emoji and leave you to sort it out. Amanda's team shipped AI powered sentiment detection to catch the messy ones, and that is genuinely smarter than a keyword list.
"They may send don't contact me again, or text me again and I'm talking to my attorney, or just an emoji, just a stop sign emoji, and put the burden back on the brand to figure out is that a real opt-out or not," she said.
The regulatory clock is ticking here too. New TCPA revocation rules took effect in 2025, and the broader revoke-all provision, the one where opting out of one message type opts you out of everything, has been pushed to January 31, 2027. Treating that delay as a nap is a mistake. The teams building intent detection now are the ones who will not be scrambling later.
Amanda's take on churn was refreshingly unbothered. Always be growing your list, and do not get sad when somebody leaves. It is a paid channel, so why pay to reach a person who is done with you?
First Party Lists Are Quietly Turning Into Ad Inventory
This part surprised me a little. Publishers are watching search referrals dry up, with news publishers expecting referral traffic to drop 43% by 2029, and that hits ad revenue right in the ribs.
So some of them are doing something clever with their opt-in lists.
"Let's just imagine that you are a sports publication and there's major news that breaks in football," Amanda said. "And you're sending out a major news alert along with this alert has been brought to you by X sponsor. So that's another advertising opportunity for them, and a highly engaged one."
The economics behind that are hard to argue with. Open rates on messaging get cited in the 90% range and higher, click through rates land in the 30 to 40% neighborhood, and email marketers celebrate 5%. TrueDialog has a customer sitting at 1200% return on ad spend, and that is on plain text, not even the rich stuff. Your first party list stops being a cost center and starts looking like inventory.
What Marketers Should Actually Do Next
Amanda closed with the tree proverb, and it lands. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best time is today.
If you are not texting yet, start with the boring part. Learn the opt-in rules, get the compliance basics right, then start building the list. After that, get creative with use cases, and lean on your vendor to brainstorm with you rather than just handing you a login.
There is a semantic coherence argument in here too. Your brand shows up in a thread next to people your customer actually loves, so the entity-based authority you build there is different in kind from a banner ad. Show up badly and you get deleted. Show up usefully and you get read, pretty much every time.
The channel is clean right now. Carriers block unregistered traffic, registration is a slog that feels like taking out a bank loan, and the verified sender adds another gate. All of that friction is what keeps the thread worth being in, and it is basically the reason RCS business messaging still feels different from every other place your brand shows up.
So go plant the tree.
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