How SMS Marketing benefits your email marketing strategy

“Is SMS marketing the new email marketing?”

If you’ve found yourself asking this question, you’re probably wondering if it’s time to work SMS into your overall lifecycle marketing strategy. But you may also be asking yourself if you should be focusing so much on email marketing. Sure, with a 4400% ROI on average, email marketing still reigns as a supreme marketing channel, but as marketing tools and strategies evolve, you also understand that it’s important to be open to any options that can improve your campaigns—including SMS marketing.

While email marketing and SMS marketing certainly both hold their own and offer immense advantages, combining the two channels can help you create a much more effective and cohesive marketing strategy.

Before we get into why, let’s see how email marketing and SMS compare to each other.

Email marketing vs SMS marketing: how do they compare?

Let’s look at some hard numbers on both email marketing and SMS marketing:

Email marketing statistics

• There are 4 billion daily email users and that figure is set to rise to 4.6 billion by 2025. (Statista)
• Average open rate across all industries is 21.3% with an average click-through rate of 2.3%. (Campaign Monitor)
• 50% of people make a purchase from marketing emails at least once every month. (Salecycle)
• Almost 22% of all email campaigns are opened within one hour of being sent. (GetResponse)
• 59% of people said that marketing emails have influenced their purchases. (Salecycle)
• 67% of Gen Z and 59% of Millennials use their phones to check emails. (Bluecore)
• Email is the leading way consumers in the U.S. discover coupons from brands. (Statista)

SMS marketing statistics

• Americans check their phones about 160 times every day. (Small Business Trends)
• 80% of consumers prefer keeping track of orders via SMS. (Aviaro)
• 63% of millennials appreciate the less disruptive nature of text messaging. (Score)
• 70% of consumers subscribed to SMS marketing in 2022, up from 12% the year before. (SimpleTexting)
• 51% of consumers reply to a text within 1-2 minutes–and a third reply within 5-10 minutes. (SimpleTexting)
• 68% of businesses use some form of text messaging today. (Zipwhip)
• The open rate for text messages is 97% with a 6% click-through rate for both campaigns and journeys. (TextAnywhere)

When is it best to use email marketing?

Email marketing allows businesses to build and nurture relationships with their customers over time with a variety of content. While keeping your communications with your audience short and sweet is best, email also provides the platform and format to deliver medium-form content and show off the personality of your brand.

Some effective examples of email marketing are:

• Newsletters
• Welcome emails
• Promotional emails
• Product launches
• Event-related emails
• Winback emails
• Abandoned cart emails
• Purchase confirmation emails
• Delivery notifications

When is it best to use SMS marketing?

SMS marketing is typically best when you need to send out quick, timely messages to your audience. Although text messages have a high open rate, it’s important to remember that no one is eager to read a long-winded paragraph. These messages are meant to be to-the-point and convey one key piece of information in as few words as possible. 

Some examples of SMS marketing include:

• Appointment reminders
• Location-based messages
• Flash sales
• Time-sensitive offers
• Event notifications

Just like email, SMS can also be used to send your customers basic notifications.

• Shipping
• Deliveries
• Receipts
• Opt-ins
• Cancellations
• Upcoming payments

Why should you combine both email and SMS marketing?

Better engagement

With the power of both email and SMS marketing, you get double the marketing reach, which means more opportunity for your audience to engage with your brand and a higher chance of closing sales.

For example, you can send a text message to people who have opened your emails but haven’t clicked on any links as an extra nudge. Or, you can send an email to people who have clicked on a link in your text message but didn’t finish their purchase.

Combining email and SMS marketing allows you to send hyper-targeted messages that are more likely to convert because you know the person receiving the message has already shown interest in what you have to say.

Better data

By combining SMS and email marketing, you can use the customer data you receive from one channel to strengthen the other. Over time, this gives you a clearer view of your subscriber’s preferences, which makes for more accurate marketing and better opportunities for segmentation. 

Plus, having already set up and collected data from email campaigns gives your SMS campaigns a great foundation. Instead of having to start from square one, by tapping into your email data, you can get your SMS marketing up and running much faster.

Better segmentation

When it comes to SMS marketing, you can expect to pay anywhere from $0.01 to $0.05 or at least $20/month with most SMS services, which may or may not be cost-prohibitive depending on your budget. That’s why segmentation is crucial for sending your audience content they’re more likely to engage with and saving money along the way.

For example, if you have the budget, an effective strategy would be text messaging people who are engaging with your emails already since there’s a higher chance they’ll also engage with your SMS marketing, too. But overall, it’s still best to send a good cadence of texts to customers engaging with email as an extra nudge.

However, let’s say you also notice a certain amount of customers are engaging with SMS only. It would then make sense to send more offers over text to that segment.

Better compliance 

Another great benefit of using email and SMS marketing is that both are permission-based. What this means is that people have to sign up to receive your messages to let you know that they want to continue hearing from you.

Asking your customers to opt-in is important because it ensures that your business is adhering to compliance laws. But it also means that customers who aren’t interested in receiving texts don’t get bombarded with messages and develop a negative attitude towards your brand.

Overall, making sure your audience knows what they’re signing up for as they engage with your brand serves to benefit both your business and your customers.

Ready to integrate SMS into your marketing strategy?

By using email and SMS marketing together, you can create a unique, powerful marketing strategy that will help you boost sales, grow your business, and keep your customers satisfied.

If you’re ready to join the forces of email and SMS marketing, Scalero is here to help. As a lifecycle marketing service, we’ll strategize with you, help you build out a content calendar, create custom campaigns that fit your brand, and automate those campaigns.

Reach out to us to get started today.