Email and SMS Marketing are a Perfect Pair

Businesses with limited staff or budgets might ask themselves whether they should use email or SMS marketing. Both are relatively low cost. Furthermore each offers the ability to reach many people at the same time, yet provide personal interaction. SMS and email have a long history of being used for marketing.

The reason though, that it’s hard to decide is because they both work. But they are each good at different things. And that’s why they complement each other really well. So perhaps the only decision to be made is to use both of them.

For example, emails are great for longer content or extended campaigns. Statistics from Hubspot show that sending 16-30 email campaigns a month results in the highest click through rates. If you send that frequently, you can expect open rates of about 32% and click through rates of just over 6%. Not too bad for emails actually considering how full the average email inbox is. That’s why just sending one or two emails isn’t enough anymore – you need to keep your email in front of users.

In contrast, SMS messaging is better for short content. Open rates are at or above 99% and click through rates can average 36%. But users expect fewer messages via text. If you send more than six per month, users will start identifying you as spam or unsubscribe. So for text messaging, you send less often and only when the message is relevant or important to the users.

Given their differences described here, you might still think it’s ok to use one or the other. And of course it’s ok to do that, but if you can coordinate and use them both you’ll likely get better results than using just one. Here are the a few examples of how to use them together.

Once you have someone on both your lists you can use them together to promote sales, keep in touch, or follow up for customer service.

Let’s look at an example where you send a sales campaign via email with pictures and lots of detailed information designed to get them to click, visit a store, or enquire for more information. If the sale has a limited time, then follow up the email with an SMS. For example, the text could say something like, “Just 8 hours left in our weekend sale! Follow this link to get 20% off: [link]”.

The text message is a timely alert to a limited offer that is fully explained in the emails you’ve been sending. I don’t know about you but I often forget about a sale I saw in an email, even if it is something I’m interested in (If it’s something I need I’ll probably remember more often). A text alert might just be the thing to get someone to buy during the sale when they otherwise wouldn’t.

Another use would be if they had visited your website for the sale, but abandoned their cart. You could send a text saying “You forgot something! The sale for items in your cart ends today! Follow this link to return to your cart and get them before the price goes up. [link]”

Chuck E. Cheese’s is a franchised chain of children’s arcades and pizza restaurants in the U.S.  The company placed advertising in the restaurant asking people to text their email addresses to a shortcode to sign up for email offers.

The benefit of having the same person signed up on both lists is that you can contact them on both channels. If they opt out on one, they will still be on the other. Depending on the reasons why they opted out of one list, you might even get them to sign back up after a time if you can prove the benefit outweighs the reasons they unsubscribed before.

Text messaging and email are both great ways to market to people, but they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Together they make a perfect pair, don’t you think?