11 May SMS vs E-mail Marketing: Who Beats Whom

Due to new marketing trends and the regular appearance and development of advertising tools, it is now very important for business representatives to choose only effective marketing channels to attract customers.

Therefore, questions often arise: which marketing tool is better to use and where to invest your advertising budget? These questions also apply to decision-making when choosing a channel of communication with customers. Which is better: SMS or e-mail mailing?

This question is not easy to answer and everything is not so straightforward, because each business has its own specifics, defined goals, and strategies. However, we will try to help you decide. In order to choose the right tool for your business, you need to objectively evaluate all the advantages and disadvantages of SMS and e-mail marketing.

Pros and Cons of E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is now at its peak! A huge number of businesses use e-mail to increase sales, customer loyalty, and communication with consumers of goods and services. There are even some positions for e-mail marketing and e-mail copywriting.

What attracts business owners to e-mail marketing? We can name at least ten main benefits of it:

• You can add any useful content to the letter to attract readers – videos, audio, or photos;
• The cost of sending letters on services is quite low, as well as the payment for traffic;
• Encourage conversions to the site by placing links in the text of the letter;
• Ability to send several types of letters to interact with the audience (information, product, service, advertising, newsletter). Sending useful and fun content keeps readers’ attention and involvement, and product advertising motivates them to use your services;
• Unlimited number of characters in the letter;
• With the help of high-quality and regular e-mails, you will be able to build a brand, position the company’s mission and your own expertise in order to gain customers;
• You can draw up letters in any way to visualize the main message;
• Ability to add a logo to increase brand awareness;
• Enabling users to unsubscribe from the newsletter;
• You can have the full delivery report due to integration with Google Analytics to analyze links and user actions.

E-mailing also has some disadvantages, the main of them are:

• The opening statistics of letters depending on the quality of the title and subject of the letter. Since the message is read-only when it is opened, and the number of incoming messages is usually quite large, the probability that the user will open your letter is not high enough;
• Only 50% of users check their e-mails and open emails every day;
• The number of clients involved in e-mail and the number of visits to your site depends directly on the quality of copywriting. In order for the mailing to be good and effective, you will need a competent specialist who is good at composing letters for your e-mail mailing;
• Spam filters can remove all suspicious e-mails;
• Your subscribers can neglect their inboxes because they create them spontaneously for a task (for example, just to register on the website), receive a lot of texts, forget a login or a password, etc.;
• The ability to unsubscribe can be not only a significant advantage but also a disadvantage.

E-mail distribution is a great advertising tool for generating sales. It helps to build relationships with customers at a level of trust. The alternation of advertising, news, and useful materials open the prospect for the growth of the popularity of your business.

However, next to this tool there is another one, no less popular – SMS text messages. SMS marketing is the spreading of marketing information about the product or service by sending it via SMS to mobile phones of consumer subscribers.

SMS marketing is considered a new effective way of direct communication with the consumer and is one of the tools of so-called direct marketing. Like any method, it has its advantages and disadvantages.

Strengths and Weaknesses of SMS Marketing

Mass text messaging continues to be popular, as it is a convenient tool for instant communication with customers. Moreover, SMS has a lot of advantages over e-mail marketing.

Let’s look at them:

• You do not need the Internet to read SMS;
• In most cases, mobile phones are at the disposal of their owners, and they are used by the majority of the population;
• Increase customer loyalty through targeting and personalized SMS;
• Ability to integrate SMS mailing into software;
• Instant view of the message immediately upon receipt. The information you want to communicate to your regular or potential customer will be read as soon as possible.
• Conciseness is a sister of SMS marketing. In 2-3 sentences it is possible to describe favorably your service or the goods and to involve the client. In the large number of promotional materials that customers receive daily, this issue is especially important in marketing strategy;
• Sending information, news, and service messages for regular interaction with mobile users;
• Easy to send: you don’t need to prepare templates, develop a corporate style, or spend money on design and layout, just prepare the text of the message and send it;
• Time-saving for businesses – sending messages to your entire customer base will take no more than 5 minutes, while the preparation of email, its design, and writing a quality text will take at least an hour;
• The maximum percentage of delivery of messages and the availability of a delivery report for each SMS;
• Some statistics: 90% of messages are read in the first 3 minutes. On average, a person looks at their phone 50 times a day, which increases the chances of quickly viewing your text. 98% read SMS compared to 20% of e-mail and 12% of Facebook posts.

Four main disadvantages of SMS marketing:

•  The text of one message is only 160 characters in Latin and 70 characters in Cyrillic, which does not always provide an opportunity to fully describe the advertising offer. If the number of characters is exceeded, the cost of SMS increases;
• Mobile users rarely have a chance to unsubscribe from SMS;
• No visualization and design, only text, alpha sender name, links to your site and contacts;
• Sometimes mobile users perceive SMS mailing as spam and do not open messages.

SMS is a popular marketing tool for both offline and online businesses. Sending service messages, informing about a delivery, availability of goods in stock, notifications about promotions, trade offers, about the performance of services via SMS becomes much faster and more convenient. You can start testing your SMS length and pricing right now to plan your marketing budget and campaigns

Supermarkets, beauty salons, car dealerships, restaurants, travel agencies, and other businesses use messaging to communicate regularly with their customers. They use services with long or shortcode texting like smartercontact.com to make their SMS mailing of high quality and convenient for customers.

Battle of the Titans – Who Wins

Both SMS and e-mail marketing have their benefits and drawbacks. By analyzing them, you will be able to determine which advertising tool will be more effective for your business. But we recommend using these two tools simultaneously, as they will perfectly complement each other in your marketing strategy.

For example, you can send fan content and news about your company to customers via email, and service alerts and promotional offers via messages.

Try, analyze and improve interaction with your customers. It is worth remembering that any mailings are regulated by a number of laws on the protection of personal data, which are mandatory. There are both international regulations and individual laws of each country that regulate this issue.

When choosing a variety of professional services for SMS and e-mail messaging, keep in mind your goals, advertising budget, and most importantly – the needs of the audience. This will allow you to figure out what to choose.