Does SMS Marketing Actually Work?


Depending on the circles you follow, you may have already heard about SMS marketing. For those that don’t understand how it works, SMS marketing pretty much does what the name implies. Companies market their businesses and products to people via SMS messaging (i.e., through text messages). This method method of marketing is often considered to be a much more effective and useful form of marketing by many. But is it really?

To do understand that, we’ve first got to go over some interesting smartphone and cellphone numbers. Today, over 83% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. 46% of those smartphone owners have said that they “couldn’t live without” their smartphones. Of all U.S. Americans that own any type of cellphone (smart or ‘dumb’), 80% of them text regularly.

You may start to see a general trend forming here. People love their phones and they love to text using their phones. Not only that, but they also love getting notifications on their phone. One study reported that 2/3rds of all consumers were happy or enthused to get a text message notification. This means that, not only are people more likely to have and use a smartphone, but they are equally excited to open a message up or receive a notification, meaning that they are more apt to read a SMS message.

SMS Vs. Email Marketing – Which Works Better?

Depending on your history with either marketing method, this may be more than self-evident. While email marketing was an effective way of reaching out to people throughout the 2000s and even most of the 2010s, with smartphones become more and more prevalent, so too has the decline of interest in emails. While most people may likely own multiple email accounts, the reality is that it has fast become seen as an ultimately inferior method of communicating with others – especially when compared to text message.

In fact, many existing studies show that people aren’t interested in email nearly as much as text messaging, with some reporting a 5x difference between the two in terms of open rate and Link Click Through rate. In addition, one study noted that, where a user would often respond to a SMS message in under 90 seconds, that same person would take roughly 2.5 Days to do the same for an email.

Conclusion

Really, there’s not much of a conversation. While there are certainly some areas or arguments one could make against SMS marketing, the reality is that, at least when compared to the once highly successful and popular email marketing, SMS marketing has easily dominated in all areas and fields.

If you are someone starting or just learning about SMS marketing, there are a plethora of different platforms available worth checking out. Textedly (textedly.com) is one of the more well-known and popular options, offering a great entry-level route for anyone serious about getting into the field.