Email and SMS Marketing: Compare and Contrast Channel Benefits

In recent years, businesses around the world sought out new digital channels, including email and SMS marketing. Over time, companies seek out the latest tools to attract their audience, engage customers, and convert prospects.

Email marketing, a mainstay in the digital world, first made its mark dating back to 1978. Meanwhile, its slightly younger sibling actually still goes back to 1984. However, both still lead the way as primary advertising channels in 2023.

The Differences Between Email and SMS Marketing

While both forms are cut from the same cloth, email and SMS marketing differentiate widely in their reach, content, and visuals. Despite the differences, this isn’t to say that one is all-around a better option for brands than the other.

For example, email focuses more on sharing long-form content like blog posts, gated pieces (eBooks, checklists, etc.), newsletters, and press releases. Additionally, email campaigns often involve big, bold graphics, leaning into the visual storytelling. However, the average inbox contains 8,024 emails. With numbers this high, standing out represents an uphill battle for the average business. Often, this leads to much lower open and click-through rates compared to SMS marketing.

Speaking of which, SMS marketing tends to face limited character counts. Also, SMS lacks the visual elements of email-based marketing campaigns. On the plus side, SMS tends to be the most direct form of marketing. As a matter of fact, SMS marketing boasts a whopping 98% open rate on average!

The Benefits of Email Marketing

As part of our comparison between email and SMS marketing, it’s crucial to identify both of their benefits. First, email marketing lends itself to long-form communication strategies. As mentioned, this opens up the possibility of integrating brand-centric images, videos, and other forms of shareable content.

Furthermore, email marketing leaves room for further interactivity. In a typical campaign, marketers embed numerous links, forms, and cursor interactions. This helps to generate a “heat map” of user behavior, identifying the best-performing content.

Thirdly, email marketing’s less intrusive approach allows marketers to send more frequent campaigns. Over time, this helps to grow deliverability, increasing future campaigns’ odds of reaching the primary inbox (as opposed to spam, social, or promotion folders).

The Benefits of SMS Marketing

When discussing email and SMS marketing, the latter reflects a hotter commodity in the digital world. While government legislators look for better ways to regulate the industry, it really is still in its infancy. This helps brands to achieve those high open and click-through rates.

Right now, consumers consider fewer than 3% to be spam. However, this depends on the brand and the marketer’s tact. Similar to email campaigns, SMS requires the appropriately defined cadence.

For the most part, SMS campaigns offer a great environment for limited time offer advertising. The direct message naturally facilitates a sense of urgency. On average, consumers take around 90 minutes to respond to an email (if they see it at all). This creates a sense of frustration for brands hoping for quick, time-sensitive campaigns. Conversely, the average response time for an SMS campaign falls closer to 90 seconds.

Moreover, consumers are 4.5x more likely to reply to a text than other forms of communication. Not only does this increase the initial engagement, it leads into real-time conversations with the target market.

Using Email and SMS Marketing to Complete a Multi-Channel Strategy

Despite their differences, marketers rely on email and SMS marketing as top tools of the trade. Both channels come with their share of pros and cons.

Where SMS thrives with immediacy and conversations, email works well with sharing long-form content and delivering big experiences. So, the best marketing strategies include a multi-channel approach with both email and SMS as key parts to reach more customers.

To launch your marketing strategy in 2023, book an Intro Conversation with the digital advertising and branding specialists at Rizzo Young Marketing.