Email marketing has proven to be one of the most reliable and value-adding marketing strategies for a very long time. However, SMS marketing is the new reliable service because of the rise of cellphone possession and usage among adults. 

A wide range of brands market their products/services through these channels, so it has become hard to assess the success of each medium separately. Suppose you want your marketing campaign to be successful. In that case, you need to identify the right strategies and employ them to achieve the highest ROI(return on investment) on the amount that you invest in either of the strategies.

Whether you want to contact consumers to market your product, gain feedback, or explain how they can use the product, you can find all the relevant strategies below that compare SMS marketing with emailing. 

What are the main factors that you need to compare between SMS marketing and emailing?

Open Rate

When comparing emails to SMS, the biggest and the most important factor at the top is the open rate. So what exactly is an open rate? It is a marketing metric that assesses how often a message is opened. So basically, this feature tells you whether or not the message you sent through email or SMS has been received and read.

With the accessibility of mobile phones, the open rate for SMS has recently shot up, and it now overpowers email marketing. The recent average open rate of SMS text messages was 98%, which is way above the email marketing open rate of 20%. Even if you bring in the time factor in the research process, text messages are opened way more than emails.

Text messages, when you want to contact consumers quickly, are way better than emails because customers usually open the message within 90 seconds of delivery because of the quick notification feature on mobile phones. At the same time, emails can take about 90 minutes to be opened and seen.

Click Through Rate

The clickthrough rate tells you how quickly your message was opened, read, and acted upon. SMS marketing has a clickthrough rate of 19% because SMS is short (around 3-5 sentences), so customers quickly read them and click on the links.

Emails often stay behind in this race because they are pretty long, and sometimes the information overload demotivates the consumers to click on the links provided there.

Deliverability

You might have missed important emails at many crucial moments in your life because the email quickly goes into the spam/junk folder or because you did not log in to your email on time. 

Even though the recent development of mail apps has combated this issue because you get a notification on your phone every time you get an email, the deliverability of SMS still surpasses that of emails.

Why is that so? Around 50% of the emails sent daily are in spam folders due to many unidentified bots. Whether the text message is important or not, it gets delivered in seconds with very little chance of the customer not receiving it.

Cost and Customisation

When you choose a marketing campaign, the main question should be about the cost of the campaign and the ROI (return on investment) that it generates. The cost of a text message(SMS) varies according to the length of the text, and it can usually get expensive if you need to customise the messages as well.

However, email marketing is fairly less expensive, and customization is also very easy. You can employ online resources to quickly add small personal touches to the email for each customer.

Now that we have reviewed the factors you need to consider when choosing either of the two marketing campaigns, we need to look at several other things that may also influence your decision.

Is SMS marketing as effective as it seems?

To answer that, you first need to identify your purpose of marketing. Are you sending messages for customers to click on a link and act? Are you trying to provide information about the product? Are you announcing a new product in the market? Each of these questions will form your decision differently. , But we will talk about some general factors which decide whether SMS marketing is effective or not.

SMS marketing, as compared to emails, is still the most used platform because 90% of adults have access to mobile phones. The information is short, quick, and relevant. So adults, especially the more busy ones, prefer them over emails as it saves time and serves the purpose.

As we said before, unlike email marketing, SMS marketing does not have a spam screening process for each message. This means that 98% of the time, your message will be delivered to the customers, and they may even act upon it. Emails are only received and read 20% of the time.

Customers often prefer to get notifications about offers and updates regarding a product because they do not have the time to research on their own about every update. This means that you are providing the customers with what they need, which constitutes a step towards a successful marketing campaign.

Conclusion

When you, as a firm, decide on a marketing campaign, you must assess what the consumer wants. Often, brands market their product in the right and successful way, but they forget about the consumers’ preferences.

In email marketing, the storage on our drives is usually less, and marketing emails from brands fill up most of it. This works as a demotivating factor for the customers, and they might never open your emails. However, there is a good side to email marketing as well.

A recent survey shows that 79% of consumers welcome emails that inform them about a new product, service, coupons, and more. So your emails may even be received very well by the consumers.

In the end, the decision completely depends on your main focus for each campaign and how you can use the better marketing campaign for its success.

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