Customers’, or potential customers’, inboxes are fuller than they’ve ever been. I’m sure yours is too – for promotional emails from brands you’re engaged with in the past, to newsletters you may have signed up for years ago, to cold emails from people you’ve never heard of. With as much content as is being pushed out on a daily basis, what’s the best way to reach your customers, and more importantly, drive action? Today, we’re focusing on email vs SMS marketing – where they fit, where they don’t, and how to effectively reach users without risking fatigue or ending up in a “promotions” folder.
The Landscape
Did you know that 81% of companies use email as part of their marketing strategy, and 64% of small businesses lean on email marketing? And on the consumer side, 88% of people check their emails every day, and 41% of email views come from mobile devices.
When it comes to SMS statistics, sms marketing can have up to a 98% open rate, a 45% response rate, and 1 in 3 consumers check texts within one minute. That being said, Americans send or receive an average of 41.5 text messages per day.
As mentioned above, we’ve never gotten more emails or text messages than we do today. Tomorrow it may be more, and so on. The question becomes “how do we do this better?” What can we do to cut through the noise?
A successful communication strategy starts with having something to say and a way to say it. What are you offering? Why is that relevant to your audience? How urgent is this need from the user side? Anyone can put together an email or SMS blast and send it out, but fewer can do so and get a return without fatiguing the audience, leading to diminishing returns in the future, if not ‘unsubscribes’ now. We need to focus on a few things to make sure you’re ready to pull the trigger on a communication strategy, and that once you do, you can expect it to have a positive impact on your business:
Don’t Do it Just to Do It
The first thing to ask yourself is “Why are we doing this?”
Is it to stay top of mind with a specific audience? To offer a promotion on a new product or service? Is seasonality serving as a prompt? (Example: an HVAC company sending out a quarterly or bi-monthly reminder to change your filters, or a doctor’s office sending an email towards the end of the year reminding patients to take advantage of their HSA accounts.) If you can’t articulate the why behind the communication, you’re already off to a rough start. The why should serve as the driving force – we send our monthly newsletters out to share our insights in the world of marketing and showcase the projects we’ve been working on (especially if they’re what we’d like to do more of!). We’d love for our subscribers to see what we’re doing on the website design and development side of things and think, “I’d love something like that for myself.”
Read our guide on email marketing: Email Marketing for Small Teams: Maximize Your Impact with Less Effort
A Moment for Compelling Subject Lines
The best-written email, or SMS message, in the world doesn’t matter if it’s never opened. This doesn’t mean it’s time to return to the clickbait titles of the late 2000’s, but a compelling subject line (or opening of an SMS message) can make or break a campaign. Be direct, but don’t be afraid to be creative. Stay within your business’s lexicon and let’s keep the emojis and exclamation points to a relative minimum. It’s always worth mentioning that it should be representative of the message itself – if you want to ensure users opt out, hit them with a bait and switch. A/B testing over the course of a few months can provide insight into what works best for your respective audience, but following the advice above is a great place to start.
Email vs SMS – Is It Truly a Choice?
At the end of the day, it’s never truly email vs. SMS – it’s more a case of when to use each, individually or in tandem with one another. We’re not big believers in the concept of “more is always more,” as you will definitely hit a point of diminishing returns at best, and user fatigue and opting out at worst. That being said, it’s possible to strike a balance where your business remains top-of-mind with your subscribers, you can drive meaningful action for your business, and you might even grow your email list while you’re at it.
The Use Cases
Now, how do you actually use both email and SMS together in a cohesive communication strategy? That heavily depends on your business. A rule of thumb we use when differentiating between email and SMS is the level of urgency. The more urgent the ask, prompt, or reminder, the more we’d look to SMS. Another major factor to consider is the volume of content – do you have a few paragraphs of information to distribute? Email, almost definitely. 250 characters or fewer would be more suited to SMS, assuming the level of urgency also aligns.
Very generally speaking, we lean on email much more frequently than we do SMS, as the use cases for SMS are still much more specific. We’ll list a few SMS examples below, for reference:
- Appointment reminders for patients of a doctor’s office
- Service visit reminders for an HVAC technician or plumbing company
- Review prompts after either of the two previous examples
- Time-sensitive information for an event (same day)
- A reminder about the closing of a silent auction for a non-profit
Email is much more versatile. All of the above can also be sent out via email, and depending on the level of urgency and the composition of your audience, we’d likely recommend leaning on both simultaneously. With the newer functionalities that have been rolled out by providers like Mailchimp, you can easily do both in one place.
The Risks That Come With SMS
Frequency-wise, it’s vital that you’re sensitive to not overdoing it, especially on the SMS side. Email has more leeway – users are used to getting emails from brands much more frequently than they are with SMS messages. Users are more likely to opt out of SMS messages than to unsubscribe from your email list, all else being equal.
Think about it, and discuss internally, before jumping into an SMS-driven strategy, and if you have any questions – we’re here to talk!
