Texting is the new email.

83% of millennials open SMS messages within 90 seconds of receiving them, according to an OpenMarket study.

Yesterday, Lio Slama launched Neo, an SMS bot and CRM software built to drive revenue through texting.

SMS marketing is a huge opportunity for companies. Statista reports that nearly half (44%+) of the world’s population owns a smartphone.

The maker of Neo, asks, “Why can’t we chat with small businesses through SMS the same way we text our friends?” And it’s a valid question, given that we all carry our phones everywhere and open funny GIFs from friends pretty much instantly.

Let the facts talk, engagement stats compared to email are mind-blowing, Sama reports, “Email open rate is 15% where SMS is 98%. Email response rate is 6% where SMS is 46%.”

We all use our phones to text friends daily. It's familiar and personal. Companies like Neo and Community.com are making it easy for companies to text customers like you would your friends, and are seeing pretty interesting engagement rates.

You can even text us on (415) 481-3148 for a pre-launch surprise each Friday (if you're based in the US or Canada).

Regardless of a well-received launch, they should definitely get a cat! (Check the product for more context.)

If you’re interested in SMS marketing and tools, have a look at these:

Clerk is the texting (SMS/MMS) solution built for Slack.

SMS Bot Creator automates your SMS replies using a trainable bot.

Botsify is a chatbot builder (including SMS textbot) with lots of integrations.

Really Good Texts curates ridiculously good text marketing campaigns.

Privy Text provides text message marketing for small and growing ecommerce brands.

SMS Marketing Examples collects the world's best SMS marketing case-studies.

This app wants to document the entire history of you.

Haptic is a simple and beautifully designed action-based journal for the iPhone.