PRACTICAL GUIDE

SMS or email? The ultimate comparison

Campaign SMS Or email? These two direct marketing channels can help you attract new customers or re-engage an existing contact list. But which one will generate the most engagement from your target audience? smsmode^© provides you with a detailed look at the secrets of these two tools.

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Introduction

A marketing strategy always involves sending messages. Whether you use only email, SMS , or both channels, you should ask yourself these questions:

• Which campaigns are best suited for my communication strategy?
• Will switching to SMS improve engagement?
• Are my email campaigns achieving the open rates they deserve?
• How are other companies in my industry doing it?

All these questions are on the minds of marketing professionals at every company. Everyone wants to send their customers the right content, the right text, at the right time, with the right type of messages. While there’s no magic formula, it’s still clear that the KPIs for messages SMS and emails are a great help in refining your marketing strategy and determining the best communication approach, the campaigns to run, and the type of email that best suits your customers. That’s exactly why we’ve put together this comparison of SMS vs. email.

KPIs

Find out whether email or SMS is best for your communication based on trends observed among companies in their marketing messages.

Readership rate

95% for web SMS s vs. 20% for email.

SMS s are the channel for engagement. With an open rate of 95%, they far surpass email marketing (which, moreover, has a read rate of only around 15%). Emails often go unnoticed and get lost in the inbox, buried among the flood of emails (an average of 144 per employee) that your customers receive every day. Sixty percent of the population reports spending at least two hours a day on their phone: web SMS s benefit from this mobile presence among the public.

Reading times

4 minutes for a web SMS , vs. 90 minutes for an email.

90% of SMS are read within 4 minutes of being sent, whereas email has a response time of 90 minutes (when a response is received). Only SMS guarantees immediate communication and an instant response from your recipient. Unlike email, SMS ensures that your customers and contacts will see your message very quickly.

Mobility

91% for web SMS vs. 72% for email.

91% of people always have their cell phone within reach, no matter where they are or what time of day it is. The likelihood of receiving SMS is therefore higher. With email marketing, the experience is different. Email is more often checked on a computer. 35% of emails are opened first on a computer and 59% on smartphones (source: mindbaz – 2020). SMS s are the mobile channel with the widest reach on phones, as they require no internet connection, no special tools, and no app download. Notifications are important, especially since receiving an email rarely triggers anything more than a banner on a locked screen. For a critical service or an unmissable marketing message, it’s therefore better to prioritize SMS s over emails.

SPAM

10% for the web SMS , compared to 80% for email.

8 out of 10 emails end up directly in the “spam” or “junk” folder of an email account. This is not the case with SMS , where this option simply did not exist until 2017. Since then, the percentage of SMS messages classified as spam has remained stable at 10% (source: findstack). The simplicity of SMS s (a plain text message with no formatting and limited to 160 characters) is also its strength compared to email: a punchy, readable, and easily memorable message in which it’s less obvious to include “spammy” content.

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