- By Matt Mills
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- Sep 18, 2024
A quick suggestion if the rumored fourth movie of the storied Bill & Ted series does indeed make it to the big screen: the title should be Bill & Ted’s Excellent Email Marketing Adventure.
Turning back the clock waaay back to when email marketing was still a useful endeavor.
Reaching far, far back in the trusty time machine to a time and a place when email had high open rates and tons of engagement.
In all honesty, I do not believe that email marketing is no longer useful or that email is completely antiquated. In fact, email can still be one of the more impactful marketing vehicles when set up correctly and combined with the right audience.
But is it time to start thinking beyond email marketing? Beyond in this context meaning either as a supplement to current marketing strategies or even to tap into a new market / demographic / channel.
Or, if not thinking beyond email marketing, then moving to something that acts like a good partner to email marketing – like Bill is to Ted? Or should I say like Ted is to Bill?
Enter SMS.
According to a recent Gartner report, SMS open rates can be as high as 98% and SMS response rates can be as high as 45%. Alternatively, open rates for email are around 20% and response rates are around 6%.
Reports on SMS open rates are plentiful, so I took a look around to see if I could find supporting evidence for the 98% open rate referenced by Gartner. Open rates, based on research out there, tend to hover between 80% and 98%. For example a Shift survey found that 82% open every text they receive.
On the email side, Klaviyo recently reported just under a 40% open rate for email (all industries), while Mailchimp recently had the email open rate at just under 36% across all industries.
In summary, we’re looking at email open rates of roughly 20% to 40% versus SMS open rates of roughly 80% to 98%. This amounts to about a 2.5x to 4.5x return if you choose to go with SMS over email in a vacuum.
So, scrap years of work setting up and crafting successful email campaigns and just cross fingers and go all in with SMS? No, what if email marketing stays and text messaging augments what already exists? One method hitting the street in 2024 is to convert existing email lists to new opted-in SMS lists.
What about automation?
It’s a fact: email marketing has evolved quite a bit in the past decade. Marketers are now able to make use of automations that can vastly improve performance – automations that flat-out didn’t exist not that long ago. For example, automated flows like emails to abandoned carts or even post-purchase emails have been shown to increase ROI across industries.
So the presence of automation in email marketing is a clear win for email vs. SMS, right?
Not exactly. SMS technology is improving in recent years, as well, leading to features like inbound SMS automations that can act as lead generation tools, customer service helpers, and other parts of any modern business.
A recent piece from PCMag highlighted some compelling points about how consumers view SMS. For example, about 85 percent of smartphone users prefer text messages to emails or calls, while 90 percent of smartphone users open SMS messages within three minutes.
Some people still prefer email but it appears the tide is shifting. Maybe it’s not so much leaving the Stone Age as it is building new tools out of those same stones.