Email Marketing Vs SMS Marketing: Where To Invest?
Email marketing and SMS marketing
Email marketing and SMS marketing are two of the most effective lead generation strategies in the digital age. The question is, which approach is more suitable for your business? After all, not every company is the same – what works for one may not work for another.
To determine which strategy will support your company objectives in less time and less money, you need to consider factors such as cost, click-through rate (CTR), level of engagement, open rate and return on investment (ROI).
SMS vs Email: What To Consider?
Open Rate
When it comes to open rates, SMS marketing has a clear advantage over email. SMS boasts a 98% open rate, compared to the 21% open rate of email. As a result of this, the response rates of SMS are also higher than those of email.
One reason for this difference in the open rates is that SMS has more direct deliverability, reaching the customer on their smartphone and notifying them instantly, increasing the chance of being seen and opened. Generally, text messages are opened during the first 3 minutes after being delivered.
Deliverability
Every day, around 330 billion emails are sent back and forth, and this number is only expected to grow. However, 50% of these emails end up in spam or promotions. This significantly reduces the deliverability of the emails, and if you are not in control of every single step in your email marketing channel, the chance of your email ending up not being seen can be high.
In contrast, every day around 6 billion SMS texts are sent. And because there are no spam filters for text messages, once sent out, the SMS is sure to land on the smartphone of the recipient.
Of course, both email and SMS are opt-in marketing channels. And you can only send your messages to people who opted in to receive them. And in the case of both channels, people can choose to opt out through unsubscribing and blocking. However, in the case of SMS, the deliverability rate is higher, as is the chance of your text being seen.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The next thing to pay attention to when choosing a marketing channel is the average CTR. SMS boasts a staggering 19% CTR. This is in part because of the laconic nature of SMS: the texts are short, and the recipients scan them quickly and click the link to see the offer. In the case of email. The average CTR can vary from industry to industry, being higher for hobbies, for example, and lower for promotional content. The average email CTR for all industries as of February 2022 was 1.27%, significantly less than in the case of SMS. The length of emails also has to do with this: because they are considerably longer than texts, people often don’t have enough time to read through the entire email to reach the call-to-action and click on it.
Cost
Both SMS and email are quite affordable and accessible channels, but the overall cost will depend largely on your needs. The price for text marketing campaigns may depend on the character count, the number of texts sent by the carrier, and the service provider. Email marketing campaign costs, while sometimes more affordable than texts, can also vary depending on the customization options you choose to go with. Again largely depending on the digital service provider you partner with.
Customization
Because of their shortness, SMS texts are less customizable than email. Because of being limited to a certain number of characters, there is so much you can do when personalizing your text messages. There are ways, of course, to tailor your texts to the audience. But they need to be short, precise, and to the point. Using visuals can also be a problem, as not all providers offer the service. And not everyone on your contact list will have.
What to choose?
Both SMS and email are valuable tools in the arsenal of brands as part of their digital marketing efforts. And both come with their benefits and disadvantages.
SMS offers higher open and click-through rates, but may not be the best option if you are looking for wide customization options. Additionally, because of being a new digital channel, it is not yet as widely trusted as email. Which has been around for a while now.
Email, on the other hand, can get easily lost in the crowded inbox. And as a result, has significantly lower click-through rates. However, being an affordable channel, it brings a high ROI. And because email has been there since the dawn of the Internet, people are used to companies communicating with them through email.