Is SMS Marketing Better than Email Marketing?

Marketing
February 18, 2022

The digital marketing tactics you deploy for running your business determines the success of your business to an extent.

Businesses now depend on the insights from data and target their audience concisely with the tactics they choose to deploy. 

The competition that exists in the online marketplace is getting fiercer by the day. Deciding which marketing medium to use between SMS, email, or both marketing option is crucial for the success of your business. Selecting the tactics for marketing is the first step. This will be important for setting the framework for marketing activities and engagements. This also precedes the selection of platforms that are instrumental in achieving such marketing objectives. 

About SMS Marketing

Short Message Service (SMS) marketing entails promoting brand awareness via texting services. It usually includes a user receiving automated texts about a business and its offerings. On confirmation of subscription, such user receives periodic texts to inform such individual about new and existing products or services from the business. This effectively maximizes the result of the marketing campaign. 

About Email Marketing

Email marketing is a direct marketing strategy that allows communication between businesses and their target audience using the different electronic mailing platforms. Several people have email addresses that they access a couple of times every day. Statistically, email marketing generates about 50% more sales in comparison to every other lead generation tactic. 

SMS Marketing Vs Email Marketing 

Selecting the right marketing tactics is important to the success of your business. Because of its ability to communicate your business offering, picking the tactics that will return better results. Below are some deciding factors worthy of your consideration when selecting the best marketing tactics for your business

Open Rate

SMS marketing tactics still holds one of the highest open rates in the marketing category. Statistically, SMS has a 98% open rate. This is great for making introductions and maintaining engagement with your business subscribers.  In comparison, the Email marketing option has an open rate of around 22%. Depending on the engagement subject of the email, its open rate depends on how you can engage the receiver in a few seconds.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This metric is crucial to determine if your business marketing campaign is encouraging the receiver to take a certain action. This metric shows the number of people that clicked on a link, a message, or an image. Because of the dozen cold email marketing messages that customers get every day, there is an increase in spam classification for genuine emails. This ultimately leads to a low CTR score for Email marketing.

On the other hand, SMS has a higher CTR because its periodic message comes after a customer must have subscribed to receive these notifications. 

Internet Access

The number of smartphone users around the world may be increasing, but the number of people connected to the internet is not increasing at the same rate. This is one of the reasons why SMS marketing has a slight edge over Email marketing. While SMS marketing is instant and does not rely on the internet, Email marketing requires that your target audience have a reliable internet connection to access your message. 

Size of Content

Email marketing can pack several characters with flexibility around images, numbers, and text. Using colors and other attention-grabbing characters makes email marketing stand out. Knowing how to properly combine these elements to get your audience to take the desired action is crucial. Comparably, SMS marketing only uses text. Although this concise way of presenting information to your audience has its own advantage, its limitation to just text can limit the amount of information it contains. 

Response Rate

The response rate helps you to measure how quick customers are taking action in response to your marketing campaign. Depending on how the message is crafted and the CTA in the message, both SMS and Email marketing campaigns show an average response rate. Although SMS get a slightly higher response than emails, it all depends on the way these messages are composed and the engagement they manage to generate. 

Summing It Up

The Call to Action matters a lot in both marketing strategies. They are useful to spur customers to action while keeping them updated about new and existing products and services that your business offers. While there is no definite marketing option that fits all, the factors above should help you select which tactics are better for your business.  

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