SMS Marketing vs Email Marketing: Pros and Cons for 2024

Let’s go back in time to 2010…

“Silly Bandz” are popular, Disney Channel is still somewhat decent, and James, a small business owner, is excitedly launching his first email newsletter campaign.

(Not that email was a new thing in 2010, but James is a little late to the game…)

Fast forward to 2024, and James finds himself staring at his smartphone, debating whether to hit send on a text message blast to his customers.

In just over a decade, the landscape of digital marketing has transformed dramatically, leaving many entrepreneurs like James wondering…

“Should I stick with tried-and-true email marketing, or is it time to fully embrace the world of SMS?”

So in this article, we’ll dive into some of the pros and cons of SMS marketing vs email marketing to help you decide whether you should adopt SMS for your own business.

SMS Marketing vs Email Marketing: The Dilemma

More than likely you’re already doing email marketing, and have been doing it for a while.

If so, you’re probably reading this because you’re curious about implementing SMS.

After all, texting is now a dominant form of communication and email is getting less and less popular.

On the other hand, you don’t want to annoy your customers and prospects, and you feel like SMS will be more intrusive and obnoxious to your audience.

So let’s get started with our analysis by taking a look at the pros and cons of SMS…

Pros of SMS Marketing

SMS has several pros in its favor.

View Rates

By far the greatest advantage of SMS is that everyone sees their text messages (as opposed to emails which are often ignored, deleted, or relegated to “Promotions” or “Spam").

Anecdotally, we know this to be true—most of us rarely go without at least seeing all text messages that come in.

But is there evidence to back this experience?

In a recent study, Mobilesquared found that 55% of all messages are read and 100% of text messages are viewed.

What does that mean?

It means that, according to their survey, over half of all text messages are actually opened, and even of those that aren’t opened, virtually all text messages are at least seen.

In this way, SMS beats out almost any other marketing channel (including email).

Scarcity

One of the best ways to incentivize a sale is to make it harder for the prospect to say “no.”

You can accomplish this by creating a sense of scarcity or urgency—act now because later will be too late!

With texting, you can be reasonably confident that when you send out the message the prospect will see it in time to act.

According to some reports, 90% of people open a text within 90 seconds of receiving it.

With email, it’s far less certain. In fact, they may not see it at all.

And with email, even if your audience sees the message, they may not open it in time to access the deal. So for this particular technique of incentivizing someone to buy, you’re generally far better off using texting than email.

Conversational

No one wants to feel like they’re just a transaction.

People want to be seen as people, not as a number in a spreadsheet. So bringing a more human feel to your marketing messaging can be a great way to build trust with prospects and move them closer to a sale.

Given that, the personal nature of texting can be a really powerful sell. Approach your text marketing as a chance to start conversations with prospects.

By its very nature, texting is a two-way medium. This makes it distinct from most marketing channels. So take advantage of that.

Use texting as a way to get to know your prospects, build rapport, and better understand what it is they value and what problem they are hoping you can help them solve.

This is far easier to do with texting than with email for the reasons we have already mentioned.

Cons of SMS Marketing

While SMS has several pros as mentioned above, there are a few cons you’ll want to keep in mind…

Higher Costs

If you were to directly compare the per-message cost of SMS marketing to email marketing, you’d find that SMS costs significantly more per message.

That’s because there’s a lot that goes into sending SMS marketing messages and SMS platforms need to make sure they’re making a profit.

While this higher cost may seem like a con, the actual number you want to pay attention to is your ROI, as you likely know.

Since SMS are more widely engaged with, the costs can easily be worth it.

More Difficult to Grow a List

Because people are more hesitant to give out their phone numbers, you will almost certainly find it more difficult to grow your SMS list than to grow your email list.

So in the end, your SMS list will be significantly smaller.

While this is a con, it’s important to remember that SMS has higher open rates (and therefore better engagement) than email, so you don’t need as large of a list in order to make an impact.

Potential for Perceived Intrusiveness

As we’ve noted, SMS is a more personal and immediate channel than email.

The SMS inbox is the same place where your audience engages daily with their friends and family—your text message may show up right alongside Grandma Mary’s.

Since SMS is more personal, you’re more likely to be perceived as intrusive if you don’t use it wisely.

Limited Flexibility

SMS are by nature short and concise with little options for formatting messages or including media elements.

As such, they are not conducive to longer messaging or a formatting-heavy approach. Rather, your messages must be brief and to-the-point.

Email, on the other hand, has a lot of flexibility in this area.

Limited Analytics

While basic metrics are available, SMS typically offers less detailed analytics compared to email marketing.

For example, with SMS there isn’t a way to track actual open rates for messages.

This lack of analytics options can make it harder to gain deep insights into your campaign’s performance

Pros of Email Marketing

Having discussed some of the pros and cons of SMS marketing, now let’s talk about the pros of email marketing.

Very Inexpensive

Email is extremely affordable at typically just a fraction of a penny per message.

This generally ends up being more affordable on a per-impression basis than almost any other marketing channel.

Of course, the real question is not the per-message cost but the ROI. That being said, a lower cost does help remove initial barriers to entry.

Easier to Grow Large Lists

Consumers are used to giving out their email address in order to do just about anything online.

So they aren’t too hesitant about providing their email address when asked.

What this means is that you’re able to build larger lists without as much effort, because you don’t have to overcome as much friction.

Less Intrusive—Able to Send Higher Volumes

Email marketing has been the standard for a couple of decades now.

As such, people are used to receiving email marketing messages and are less likely to view them as intrusive.

In other words, email marketing has come to be expected—which means you can send more messages without being as concerned with how people are going to perceive you.

More Flexibility

Emails have almost endless possibilities for what you can include in your message.

You can fully customize the design, layout, font, colors, and graphics.

And there’s no functional limit as to how much text you can send as a part of your message—and thus, email is conducive to longer content.

All of these capabilities give you a lot more options for creating your messages.

More Robust Analytics

Email service providers typically have good and detailed analytics readily on hand, which helps you measure the success (or lack thereof) of your email campaigns.

Having access to these additional figures can give you greater confidence and help you be more informed about how to optimize your marketing efforts.

Testing Capabilities

Email service providers usually provide robust and easy A/B testing options.

These testing capabilities give you options to help optimize your content so that you can find messaging that really resonates with your audience—and easily analyze the results.

SMS service providers aren’t quite there yet as far as A/B testing robustness.

Cons of Email Marketing

Despite the pros mentioned above, email marketing does have a few cons.

Saturation and Lower Open Rates

Everybody does email marketing.

Therefore, people are inundated with marketing emails each and every day.

This saturation can make it difficult for your business’s emails to stand out in the inbox—they just get lost in the crowd.

This saturation helps explain why emails have lower open rates than SMS. With email, you just can’t have certainty that your audience will actually see your message.

More Complicated to Set Up and Execute

While you’d expect sending emails to be fairly simple—just hit send and the message should deliver, right?—in reality, getting your email marketing set up can be complicated.

You have to find an email service provider, set up a sender domain, make sure it’s set up correctly, and warm up the email before using it on a mass basis.

On top of that, you have almost endless possibilities in regards to how your emails should be set up.

Should you do a professional design? Text only? Should you include images? If so, what kinds of images?

All of this can be a bit overwhelming if you’re not quite sure what you’re doing.

Less Personal

Email marketing just feels like marketing. It doesn’t feel like a personal interaction.

People are not usually excited to receive a marketing email—they already receive dozens of them.

So in that sense, your emails won’t be as engaging to your audience as they could be.

SMS Marketing vs Email Marketing: Comparison

In reality, when you consider SMS and email marketing, the choice is not an either-or.

Neither choice is inherently better than the other, and both could be good for different reasons—or to use simultaneously.

In general, email is the go-to marketing channel for most businesses, and with good reason.

Email’s low barrier to entry and potential to reach a large audience help make it a very effective tool for marketing.

In other words, if you’re not already using email, you should be. In fact, there’s almost no reason not to.

On the other hand, SMS can be very effective and is a widely used channel for personal communication. And yet not all businesses have jumped on the SMS opportunity yet, so the space is not yet saturated.

In other words, if you’re not using SMS, you’re missing out on some powerful potential.

So which should you use—SMS or email?

The answer is both.

Note that you will use email marketing most of the time, both because it is very inexpensive and because your audience can tolerate email messages better than SMS messages.

But as you’re planning your SMS and email usage, you can think about ways to coordinate your efforts so that both channels support the other.

When Should You Use SMS Marketing vs Email Marketing?

So in which situations should you use SMS marketing? And when should you use email marketing instead?

Let’s just start off by mentioning that almost any time you send an SMS you could send an email as well—thus with this type of omnichannel approach, you can really make sure people see (and hopefully engage with) your messages.

But here are some situations in which one or the other might be particularly effective…

When to Send an SMS…

• For Urgent Notices: For time-sensitive information or flash sales that require immediate attention.
• For Brief Updates: For short, actionable messages that don't require extensive explanation.
• For High-Priority Alerts: For important notifications like appointment reminders or delivery updates.
• For Last-Minute Event Reminders: To boost attendance by sending day-of reminders for events or webinars.
• For Customer Service: For quick, real-time communication with customers needing assistance.
• For Mobile App Engagement: To encourage app downloads or usage with direct links.

When to Send an Email…

• For Detailed Content: When your message requires in-depth explanation or multiple sections.
• For Visual Storytelling: For campaigns that rely heavily on images, videos, or complex layouts.
• For Long-Form Newsletters: To share company news, industry insights, or curated content.
• For Content Distribution: To share blog posts, whitepapers, or other content marketing materials.
• For Inconsequential Transactional Messages: For order confirmations, receipts, and other detailed transaction information.

SMS Marketing vs Email Marketing: Examples

Here are just a couple of examples to help clarify the discussion of SMS marketing vs email marketing.

Webinar Reminders

Anyone who has hosted webinars for any length of time knows that attendance rates often disappoint.

You put in the work to create an exceptional webinar. You promote it across your various channels.

Perhaps you even get a ton of signups. And then when it comes time to go live your audience is less than half of what you had hoped for.

If this has happened to you, the first thing you need to know is that you’re not alone.

The exact number varies from study to study, but most agree that the average webinar attendance rate is below 50%.

One study puts it at 46%.

The point is that less than half the people who sign up for your webinar actually end up attending.

What can be done?

You can send reminder emails. And that generally can’t hurt.

But reminder emails are easy to ignore—think about your own email use. How often do you click emails that are just reminder alerts?

Often all that reminder emails do is briefly draw a person’s attention to the reminder before they promptly forget it again as soon as they look away.

In cluttered email inboxes, simple messages, like event reminders, are easily lost.

So what works well for reminders? Supplementing your emails with text messaging.

One marketer reports seeing attendance improvements of over 300% thanks to text message reminder messages.

If you’re struggling with sagging attendance at your webinars, texting is almost certainly going to be the best solution to your problem.

Note: with Mobile Text Alerts, you can directly integrate automated SMS reminders for your Zoom webinars and GoTo webinars,

“

Hi [FirstName]! Your 'Digital Marketing Trends 2024' webinar starts in 1 hour. Join us at 2 PM EST: [link].

Flash Sales

Have you ever tried SMS to help promote your flash sales?

It’s basically a given that you should use email for your flash sales.

But coupling your email with a corresponding SMS could pack a powerful punch.

Why?

Because flash sales are urgent, and SMS is a much more “urgent” channel than email.

“

🔥 FLASH SALE, [FirstName]! Next 4 hours only: 40% off all shoes. Use code FLASH40 at checkout: [short link]

Product Launches

Product launches are yet one more example of how SMS marketing and email marketing can be used together.

Since a product launch could be considered more of a time-sensitive notice, it’s appropriate to use SMS to help build anticipation for your launch—and to announce the launch when it happens.

But as with other SMS marketing initiatives, you don’t need to use SMS only. You can send corresponding emails to help get your message in front of your customers from all angles so that they’re aware of your new product.

“

[FirstName], the new XYZ Smartphone is here! Be among the first to own it. Pre-order now: [short link]

Use SMS Marketing and Email Marketing Together for the Best Results

So what’s better—SMS marketing or email marketing?

The answer is neither.

Both are excellent marketing channels in their own way, and you should use both as a part of your marketing strategy.

Interested in taking the first step toward exploring SMS marketing for your business?

Get a free SMS platform trial today to get a feel for how it works.