RCS is finally worth budget in India. What to send first.
SMS in India is a 160-character grey box from a six-character sender ID that nobody trusts. RCS is the same inbox with a verified brand name, a logo, images, buttons and read receipts. On Android — which is the overwhelming majority of Indian handsets — it is simply a better channel.
What you get that SMS never gave you
A verified sender. Your brand name and logo, with a verification tick, in the native messaging app. This alone changes open behaviour, because the primary reason people ignore SMS is that they cannot tell a real message from a scam.
Rich cards and carousels. Product images, prices, and tappable buttons — inside the default inbox, with no app to install.
Read receipts and delivery states. You finally know whether the message was seen, not just whether the carrier accepted it.
Suggested replies. Tappable responses that turn a broadcast into a conversation without the customer typing.
What to send first
Do not start with promotions. Start with the transactional messages you are already sending over SMS, upgraded. Order confirmations, delivery updates, appointment reminders, OTP-adjacent notifications. These have high open intent, they are expected, and they train the customer to recognise your verified sender before you ever ask them for anything.
Then, and only then, layer on the campaigns: a cart recovery carousel, a restock alert with a buy button, a booking reminder with a reschedule button.
The rules that will bite you
India's DLT registration still applies. Your sender, your templates and your consent trail all need to be registered, and template approval is not instant — build in a week. Consent is not transferable from another channel: an SMS opt-in is not automatically an RCS opt-in, and treating it as one is how brands get their sender suspended.
Fall back gracefully. Not every handset and not every carrier will render RCS. Every campaign needs an SMS fallback that still makes sense stripped of images and buttons — if the fallback reads as nonsense, the campaign is badly designed.
The frank caveat
iPhone support and carrier coverage are still uneven, and anyone quoting you a single national reach number is guessing. Run it as an upgrade to a channel you already use, measure the delivered-and-read rate against your SMS baseline, and scale on that — not on a vendor's deck.