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Email, SMS, chat, and push notifications are some common methods for businesses to connect with customers. However, email and SMS are the most reliable for delivering business messages anytime, anywhere.
No matter the scale of your business, you need to use the right communication channel to convey your messages to your customers. There is no one-size-fits-all solution since businesses adopt different marketing approaches. Both email and SMS have their strengths and weaknesses, so you need to give proper consideration.
I am here to help you with that. In this post, I will compare different email and SMS communication aspects for businesses.
Design and Personalization ✨🎨
What you can add to the message body is crucial for your marketing success. Depending on your target audience and business nature, considering the content limits of the communication channels is crucial.
Emails are very flexible in design and Personalization. You can use HTML and CSS to create visually appealing emails according to the theme of your brand. It also does a great job of delivering media files by showing images and GIFs inside the email and other media as attachments.
Using merge tags, you can also fully personalize the message to increase impact, like using first name, customer location, purchase history/activity, membership level, and many more. Just look at these merge tags lists by Mailchimp; they have dozens of tags for different situations.
SMS
SMS, a.k .a. text messages, are mainly good for text communication, as the name implies. This heavily limits your customization options, and things worsen due to their usual 160-character limit. However, even with a simple text approach, you can still add links to open interactive content. You can add links to videos, images, your website, and any important URL.
Similar to emails, merge fields can be added to personalize text messages with information like recipient name, order number, location, time, etc.
Reach and Audience 👥
Both email and SMS have their challenges in reaching the audience. You need to pick the right channels based on who your audience is and how you want to reach them.
Email is great for global communication since email service is on the internet, so it doesn’t have geographical limitations. It also provides cross-platform access; customers can open emails on their phone, tablet, or computer.
When it comes to emails reaching the customer, there are a few hiccups. It isn’t uncommon for email marketing tools to introduce delays in delivery due to longer queues and other service issues. Furthermore, users usually look at their emails conveniently, so emails aren’t good for time-sensitive messages.
Emails ending up in the spam folder is another issue, which means customers won’t even get to see your email.
Also read: Best Free Email Marketing Tools for Sending Newsletters
SMS
SMS usually works best for local communication. Although global communication is possible, it has a bunch of hurdles that don’t make it practical. Below are some reasons:
- For international messages, the carrier fee is higher, which depends on the location of both sent and received text.
- Each country has its own regulations regarding SMS marketing, and you need to comply with all regulations.
- There could be issues with delivery due to network differences or carrier-specific limitations.
- Opt-in compliance rules are different from country to country.
SMS is very efficient at reaching the target. Since it’s usually locally sent and has a lower volume, the SMS marketing tools are very reliable for prompt delivery. Even if the messaging app marks the message as spam, it still reaches the user, and they have to decide whether to block it or not.
Also read: Best SMS Marketing Platforms to Engage with Your Users
Engagement
No matter how many messages you send, if customers don’t open it and act upon it, the marketing campaign fails. So, how do email and SMS fare when it comes to customer engagement?
Emails are cluttered because customers receive hundreds of emails daily, so your email can easily get overshadowed. We can gauge email marketing engagement by looking at the open rate and click-through rate.
🔷 Open rate: This is the percentage of people who have opened the email from the total number of emails sent. Depending on the industry, it is anywhere between 17-28%, with 21.33% being the average.
🔷 Click-through rate: This is the percentage of people who clicked the link inside the email to engage with your service. For emails, the average hovers around 2.5% of the total emails delivered.
I know the numbers may seem very low to you, but email campaigns are usually very large. Even such a small percentage of engagement is a net positive ROI.
SMS
Due to less clutter and easy management, it’s much easier for customers to quickly open and check an SMS. On top of that, SMS marketing is quite direct, which creates a sense of immediacy. For SMS as well, we can check the engagement using its open rate and click-through rate.
🔷 Open rate: SMS has a whopping 98% average open rate, and nearly 90% of them are opened within the first 3 minutes of delivery.
🔷 Click-through rate: The average CTR for SMS is 36% of the total text messages delivered.
Opt-in Requirement 📋
Another very important factor to look for when choosing the communication channel. I mean, there is no point in running a marketing campaign if you can’t build a good customer contact list.
Customer consent is a must for businesses due to many regulations like GDPR, CAN-SPAM Act, TCPA, PECR, and even local laws of specific countries. Not taking explicit customer consent can lead to serious consequences. For example, GDPR fines can reach up to €20 million or 4% of the company’s global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
Almost all account creation processes require an email address, so it’s really easy for businesses to ask for consent. Usually, you can enable an opt-in checkbox on the account creation form that gives you the consent to send emails.
There are also other methods to collect consent later, like web form requests or contests and giveaways in exchange for email consent. Most people are also willing to give consent for email promotion as this practice has become a norm.
SMS
It’s a little difficult to get consent for SMS promotion as the phone number isn’t required for most account sign-ups. People are also hesitant to give their phone numbers upon request as they are considered more private than emails.
Nonetheless, there are a bunch of ways you can collect SMS promotion consent:
- You can send an SMS asking to reply with a keyword to join in.
- Add a checkbox for consent on the account sign-up page if providing a phone number is a requirement for account creation.
- For brick-and-mortar businesses, you can ask customers at the time of sale and mention that you will send promotional messages.
- Contests and giveaways also work to get SMS promotion consent.
SMS marketing works best when your business needs the customer number to provide the service. For example, delivering products to their home usually requires a contact number.
Tracking and Analytics 📊🔍
Analytics is very important for a successful marketing campaign. To improve your marketing strategies, you need to know how your customers are reacting to them. Both email and SMS marketing tools provide an analytics dashboard to track your campaign. However, due to the different natures of both channels, the limits are different.
Email is an advanced communication system with rich support for different protocols and formats, like SMTP, HTML, MIME, multimedia, etc. This creates better opportunities for developers to create better tools to track activity, such as adding tracking pixels or taking advantage of email headers to record information.
These tools can usually track granular information like open rates, CTR, bounce rate, forward rates, geolocation, time of opening, interaction with email elements, reply rate, scroll depth, email client type, and more.
This information is then displayed better using graphs and heat maps to understand better. For example, showing a heat map of elements users have interacted with most or geolocation of opened emails.
SMS
SMS protocols like SMPP are very limited and mainly focus on delivering and receiving the message. Furthermore, phone numbers are considered more private, raising more privacy concerns when being tracked. This is why there is less focus on analytics tools development for SMS tracking, so the tools are very limited.
However, you can still track a bunch of vital information that could help with your campaign. You can track delivery status, click-through rate for links, opt-out rate, reply rate, geolocation of recipient (using area codes), and more.
Furthermore, you can apply advanced tracking on the pages that you link in the SMS, which could give even better reports.
Cost 💰
In the end, ROI matters, so you need to know the costs of each channel and how they scale with your business. Below is an explanation and a comparison of costs for both email and SMS.
Email is indeed more advanced and has better tools for almost everything. However, it’s still considered the cheaper communication channel mainly because it’s easier to provide email service compared to a telecommunication service.
Honestly, it needs to be cheaper, too, because email marketing mainly depends on mass marketing due to low CTR. Unlike SMS, you need to market emails 4 times more to see similar results. You can check the comparison at the end to understand better.
SMS
SMS may be quite a basic service, but its dependence on telecommunication makes it an inherently expensive service to manage. Furthermore, since the main selling point of SMS marketing is immediacy, many tools take measures to make service reliable, like direct connections with carriers.
It’s not too big of an issue since SMS marketing is usually done on a smaller scale and has a very good CTR, so the ROI is still better.
If we check the pricing page for both Mailchimp (Email marketing tool) and SlickText (SMS marketing tool), we can see the difference:
Mailchimp’s free version offers 1000 free emails, and SlickText offers only 50 text messages. Mailchimp’s basic version includes 5000 emails, while SlickText has 500 texts. This scales much worse where the Mailchimp premium version lets you send 150,000 emails for $175, and SlickText costs $1250 for 50,000 text messages.
On top of this, SlickText will also directly charge you any additional carrier fees charged by the carriers.
Now, we will summarize the difference between SMS and email in tabular form.
| Criteria | SMS | |
|---|---|---|
| Design and Personalization | – HTML and CSS for visually appealing design | – Limited to text communication |
| – Supports images and GIFs | – 160-character limit | |
| – Merge tags for personalization | – Links for interactive content | |
| Reach and Audience | – Global communication | – Primarily for local communication |
| – Cross-platform access | – Higher carrier fees for international messages | |
| – Potential delays and spam folder issues | – Efficient for prompt local delivery | |
| Engagement | – Open rate: 17-28%, Click-through rate: 2.5% | – Open rate: 98%, Click-through rate: 36% |
| Opt-in Requirement | – Email address widely collected during sign-up | – Phone number less commonly collected |
| – Opt-in checkboxes on account forms | – Consent through SMS replies, sign-ups, contests | |
| Tracking and Analytics | – Granular analytics (open rates, CTR, etc.) | – Limited analytics (delivery status, CTR, etc.) |
| – Support for tracking pixels and headers | – Privacy concerns due to tracking phone numbers | |
| Cost | – Generally considered cheaper | – Inherently more expensive due to telecommunication |
| – Mass marketing dependence | – Better ROI despite higher per-message costs |
Pros and Cons
Now that we have compared both Email and SMS for communication with customers, it’s time to list the good and bad sides of both so you can get a better picture:
Email Pros👍
- Highly customizable message body.
- Access global audiences with ease at no additional cost.
- Advanced tracking and analytics.
- Easy to create a mailing list.
- Lower cost and easier scaling.
Email Cons👎
- Low open rate and CTR.
- Slow response from customers.
- Emails can end up in the spam folder and never get looked at.
- It is easy to unsubscribe, so there is a higher chance of customers unsubscribing. There are even tools to bulk unsubscribe.
SMS Pros👍
- High open rate and CTR.
- Instant delivery for timely communication.
- The message is usually short and simple, so people are more likely to read through it.
- Users engage promptly to an SMS with an average time being less than 3 minutes.
- Don’t depend on the internet to receive and view the message.
- Better opportunity for two-way communication using keywords.
SMS Cons👎
- Limited ability to customize the message.
- It can annoy customers if you send messages at the wrong time or too frequently.
- It’s much more expensive, so you need to be careful with your reach.
My Verdict 👨💻
Personally, I believe SMS marketing offers the best ROI. However, it has too many criteria to fill, which makes its use limited. If you can easily get access to customer numbers and your business mainly serves local customers, then SMS marketing should be preferred.
For everything else, you can’t go wrong with email marketing thanks to advanced features and global support.
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