The finding: Short Message Service (SMS) texts are often overlooked as a marketing tool. But they’re an extremely effective way for banks to reach consumers with timely and relevant messages, per The Financial Brand.

Dive deeper: Banking customers value a variety of alerts from their financial institutions (FIs) that help them monitor their accounts’ security and balance. Awareness that their money is being watched over can improve a customer’s trust in their FI. Often customers can choose to receive such alerts via SMS. 

But FIs can also use SMS for more than alerts. They can create personalized customer experiences, using data-driven insights to tailor messages just as they would for targeted email campaigns, per The Financial Brand. Such messages can be highly effective: