When your organisation is ready to send its next promotion, offer or campaign, the question isn’t just what you should say, but how you say it.
For most marketing teams in recent years, the answer has usually been via email or SMS, but RCS marketing platforms are gaining serious ground, and if you haven’t started paying attention to RCS for marketing, now is the time.
RCS is changing what’s possible with mobile marketing, here’s what you need to know, and how to do it well.
What is RCS for Marketing?
RCS stands for Rich Communication Services.
Think of it as SMS, but built for the era your customers actually live in. Where a standard text message gives you 160 characters and a link, RCS gives you branded visuals, interactive buttons, image carousels, video, verified sender profiles, and real-time read receipts, all delivered directly into your customer’s native messaging app.
No app download required, no third-party platform to log into.
For marketing teams, that distinction matters enormously. You’re not asking your customer to do anything extra. The experience meets them exactly where they already are, on their phone, in their messages.
Since Apple added RCS support in iOS 18, the channel has gone from an Android-only proposition to a near-universal one, which holds great significance.
Brands that had been holding off on RCS because of incomplete reach no longer have that reason. The audience is there. The question now is how you show up for them.
For a more detailed look into what RCS Messaging actually is, read our detailed guide here.
Why RCS Matters for Enterprise Marketing Teams
Your customers want to feel like you know them.
According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalised interactions from companies, and 76% get frustrated when that doesn’t happen.
That’s not a small margin of dissatisfied customers; that’s the majority of your audience, actively noticing when communications fall flat.
Generic, text-only blasts are an increasingly poor match for that expectation, whereas RCS enables marketing teams to deliver the personalised communication experiences their customers crave.
Compare two types of marketing campaigns that a fashion retailer sends its customers during a seasonal sale.
A simple, text-based SMS with a link and a discount code – it’s what they’ve always done, it’s simple to set up and blast out, but it’s limited in personalisation when it lands in their customer inboxes.
Compare that to an RCS message with a scrollable carousel of curated products, a personalised greeting using the customer’s name, a one-tap button to browse the sale, and a verified sender badge so the recipient knows immediately it’s legitimate.
The same two messages, delivering completely different experiences.
One is much more likely to drive action, which is why RCS for marketing teams can be gold dust when implemented effectively.
RCS Marketing Best Practices
The following best practices cover what high-performing marketing teams are doing right now to get the most out of their RCS campaigns.
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Lead with Rich Media that Earns Attention
RCS gives you visual real estate which marketing teams should take advantage of.
Whether you’re promoting a product launch, a flash sale or a loyalty reward, lead with imagery or video that stops the scroll. A well-chosen hero image or short video clip communicates value instantly, before your customer has read a single word of copy.
That said, rich media should serve the message, not distract from it.
Keep visuals clean, on-brand, and relevant to the specific offer. A busy carousel with six products and vague CTAs is likely to underperform compared to a focused one with three strong options and clear next steps.
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Use Carousels Strategically, Not Exhaustively
Carousel messages are one of RCS’s most powerful features for marketing.
They let you present multiple products, offers, or content options in a single swipe-able format, keeping everything within the message thread rather than pushing the customer to a website before they’re ready.
The sweet spot is three to five carousel cards. Fewer than three and you’re not making the most of the format. More than five and you’re asking for effort from the customer rather than reducing it. Each card needs its own CTA, its own visual, and a clear, specific value proposition. Think of each card as its own mini-ad within the message.
A travel brand, for example, could use a carousel to present three different holiday packages tailored to a customer segment. Each card shows the destination, a key benefit, a price point, and a “Book Now” button. That’s a seamless path from awareness to conversion, all within the inbox.
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Personalise Beyond First Name
Personalisation at the channel level, in other words using RCS at all, is already a step forward.
But the brands getting the best results are using customer data to tailor the content of the message itself: product categories the customer has browsed, locations relevant to them, purchase history, loyalty tier.
This doesn’t require sophisticated AI infrastructure to get started. Even basic segmentation, sending different carousel content to first-time buyers versus repeat customers, for example, can have a measurable impact on engagement.
The principle is simple.
A customer who last bought running shoes shouldn’t receive a campaign about handbags. Getting segmentation right is table stakes; personalised content within those segments is where real gains can be made.
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Make Your CTAs do the Work
Every RCS marketing message needs a clear, singular call to action. Not three competing options or a CTA buried after three paragraphs of copy.
One button, one action, one outcome.
“Shop the Sale,” “Claim Your Offer,” “Book a Demo,” “Find Your Nearest Store.” These are specific, active, low-friction prompts. They tell the customer exactly what happens next. Vague CTAs like “Learn More” or “Click Here” underperform because they add a decision step rather than removing one.
For promotional campaigns especially, urgency and specificity work together. “Shop Now, Offer Ends Sunday” is more effective than “Shop Now” alone because it adds a reason to act immediately rather than later, or never.
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Partner with a Trusted RCS Messaging Provider
The best creative in the world won’t land if your platform can’t reliably deliver it.
Choosing the right RCS messaging platform is one of the most important decisions your marketing team will make when adopting this channel, and it’s one that often gets less attention than it deserves.
A capable platform handles far more than message delivery.
It manages sender verification with carriers (a prerequisite for that trusted badge your customers see), provides fallback to SMS when RCS isn’t supported, integrates with your existing CRM and marketing systems, and gives you the analytics to understand what’s working. Without those capabilities in place, even a well-crafted campaign will underperform.
For enterprise marketing teams, scalability matters. Running a nationwide promotional campaign to hundreds of thousands of customers simultaneously requires a platform built for that kind of load.
Ask the right questions before you choose a vendor like:
- What does deliverability look like at scale?
- How is fallback handled?
- What does campaign support look like?
- The answers will tell you quickly whether a provider is genuinely enterprise-ready, or just enterprise-priced.
Why Marketing Teams Choose Soprano for RCS Messaging
As an official Google RCS Business Messaging partner, Soprano has been helping enterprise organisations communicate with their customers for over three decades.
For marketing teams, the platform handles the full lifecycle of an RCS campaign, from designing rich media messages and carousels through to delivery, fallback management, and post-campaign analytics, all within a single environment.
Supporting over 4,500 enterprise and government customers across retail, financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications, it’s built for the complexity and scale that enterprise marketing demands.
And if your strategy spans RCS, SMS, WhatsApp, and email, you can manage all of it from one place.
RCS for Marketing FAQs
What is RCS marketing?
RCS marketing uses Rich Communication Services to send branded, interactive messages to customers via their native messaging app, combining the reach of SMS with rich media, carousels, buttons, and verified sender profiles.
How is RCS different from SMS?
SMS is plain text, limited to 160 characters, with no branding. RCS supports images, video, carousels, one-tap CTAs, and verified sender badges, all without the customer needing to download anything.
Does RCS work on iPhones?
Yes. RCS has worked on iPhone since Apple added support in iOS 18, making it compatible with virtually all Android and iPhone devices.
What marketing campaigns work best with RCS?
Promotional offers, product launches, seasonal sales, and loyalty rewards all perform strongly with RCS, particularly any campaign that benefits from visual content and clear calls to action.
Do customers need to opt in to receive RCS messages?
Yes. The same consent rules that apply to SMS marketing apply to RCS. You must have explicit opt-in from customers before sending marketing messages.
What happens if a customer’s device doesn’t support RCS?
Your campaign automatically falls back to SMS, so customers on unsupported devices still receive the core message in plain text.
How do I get started with RCS marketing?
Work with a verified RCS messaging provider who handles sender registration, carrier connectivity, and platform setup. Explore RCS business messaging use cases by industry to see how organisations like yours are already using it.
Send Your First RCS Marketing Campaign Today
Your next promotion deserves more than a plain text link. RCS gives your marketing team the tools to create campaigns that are visual, personalised, and built to convert, all delivered directly into your customer’s inbox.
