According to Gartner, SMS open rates are as high as 98%, compared to just 20% of all emails. Furthermore, 75% of people said that they’d happily receive an offer or be notified of a sale via SMS.
All the odds are stacked against email marketing, so does this mean email marketing is on its way out?
Not a chance! Far from it, in fact. Yes, text message marketing is a tough competitor with its rising popularity, but email marketing is putting up a fight. It’s adapting to the ever-evolving online world, and it’s gaining strength because of it.
Email marketing is still a hugely popular channel for marketers, with 73% saying it’s their number one form of digital marketing when it comes to return on investment. Email usage continues to grow and the number of e-mail users worldwide is expected to hit 4.3 billion by the end of this year and continue to grow to 4.8 billion by 2023.
Round One: Open Rate
With nearly 270 billion emails being sent per day, a huge portion of these emails are being marked as spam and inboxes are becoming increasingly cluttered. So, it’s no surprise emails are getting deleted without being opened or read.
Text messaging, on the other hand, doesn’t face these challenges. As we’ve already seen, the open rate of these text messages is far, far higher than email due to the fact that as soon as someone receives an SMS, their phone alerts them. And if the user doesn’t open the message right away, the phone will continue to remind them they have an unread text, making this a highly advantageous feature for marketing efforts.
Round Two: Click Through Rate
Both SMS marketing and email marketing have potential to yield high click through rates. However, a good call to action puts reason behind why your customers should click through the body of a message.
Email marketing poses the upper hand here because with text message marketing you’re limited to 160 characters to entice your customers. Since the whole point to the marketing effort is to motivate your audience to act on your offer, the link is the most important asset and you need to build trust and explain why this offer, sale or promotion is so amazing.
However, SMS marketing isn’t down for the count just yet. A great way to increase CTR via SMS marketing is to use branded links in messages. It increases trust since the customer knows exactly where the link will lead and secondly, a branded link acts as the clickable CTA. Instead of forfeiting space in your message, branded links help you to get your message across and capture your audience’s attention in less time.
Round Three: Cost
This last round is a sensitive topic for most and the biggest deciding factor. Email marketing is generally a more cost-effective way to send non-time sensitive messages to a large audience. Since the customization in email marketing varies from business to business and send to send, the direct cost of each campaign usually comes in lower than any text message marketing campaign. The cost to send SMS messages varies by length of messages, cellphone carrier, and number of recipients causing text message marketing to be almost knocked out.
However, Text My Company offers a new secret combination to put text messaging marketing on top!
Text My Company offers an affordable and simple solution to enable text messaging on your existing business landline. Your voice capabilities will remain exactly the same — the only change will be the addition of SMS texting functionality.
This is similar to adding a feature like call waiting or caller ID, and there will be absolutely no other change to your phone service or equipment.
When a customer sends a text message to your existing business number, the message is automatically sent to the email address of your choice.
And the Winner Is…YOU!
The combination of using both email marketing and SMS marketing will prove to be advantageous in the fight for ROI. You just need to determine the right balance of text vs email campaigns for your organization and industry.
With Text My Company they give you the power to have text message marketing at an affordable price. To enable texting on your business landline, please check out Text My Company’s website and get connected to their registration team to start texting your clients today!
