Email vs Text Marketing – Which One’s Better?

Compare both communication channels

With the rapid growth of technology, businesses are now presented with more options to reach out to their customers. Email and text marketing are two popular digital marketing methods often compared for their effectiveness. Email and text have their advantages and disadvantages, making it difficult to decide which is better when choosing a marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Email is an excellent medium for sending longer, richer messages that include images and links to more information on the web. Their length and complexity can vary greatly. Email Marketing is affordable and helps keep your business top-of-mind. You can track opens, click-through rates, and other metrics.

Text Marketing

SMS is the perfect communication channel for concise, timely information or promotions. Texts can include an image and links. They are very short and powerful if used appropriately. A text can jump-start interest and get traffic to a webpage, start a chat, or get your phone to ring.

— Very likely, your text will be viewed right away.

Compare

Deliverability

SMS delivery rates can be as high as 98%. Email deliverability hovers around 84%

Open Rates

The average open rate for SMS is over 95% versus about 20% for email.

Click-through Rate

With SMS marketing, the CTR is about 19%. The average CTR of emails hovers around 3%.

Cost

It may cost more to set up Text Marketing with annual, monthly, and per-text fees. (We think it’s worth it!)

Your metrics may vary depending on the size and quality of your contact lists.

Use both

Using a combination of email and text marketing may be a great choice to reach leads, customers, and clients.

Both can have lists (segments/groups/tags), so you can customize your messages to different groups of people, and both offer personalization.

Think about the future…

Even if SMS Marketing is not something you want to implement right now, start collecting and organizing phone numbers and contact information of leads, current clients, past clients, and customers. Ensure the opt-in forms on your website have a field to collect phone numbers. You never know when this might come in handy…