In this article I’m going to outline exactly why I think online SMS is superior to traditional email marketing.
1. Reliable Delivery Rates
Email is great. It is one of my go to marketing tools but the issue with email marketing is that it has trouble actually delivering your message to the intended recipient.
For example, not a lot of marketers know this but their emails actually have a score, the higher the score the higher the chances of your emails being delivered, the lower your score the lower your chances of being delivered. With the help of a reliable email deliverability tool like Klean Leads, you can monitor and improve your email score to ensure optimal deliverability.
You thought that just because you sent out an email that your email would actually get delivered? Not true.
In order to maintain a high email score is to make sure that people are actually opening your emails, this is the engagement rate.
The lower your engagement rate, the lower your email score. This is why email marketers need to clean their lists of people who do not respond because of the negative impact it has on their delivery rate.
Online SMS has no score that must be maintained – you send, they get, it is really that simple.
According to A. Barrett from SMSpapa.com.au poor delivery rates have a major impact on sales revenue over time. Online SMS allows you to relax knowing that virtually 100% of your text messages will be delivered.
Why SMS Is Better
SMS has no reputation score. As long as the mobile number is correct and the recipient is in mobile coverage they will receive your SMS message virtually 100% of the time.
2. High Open Rates
When it comes to marketing there are a few key stages that a promotion must move through before there is a conversion, and the most important stage is after actually getting your message delivered is the open rate.
Unfortunately, when it comes to email this was one of my greatest frustrations.
Not only do you need to worry about your email score, you also need to make sure that you are not using keywords inside your email that will trigger the spam algorithm forcing your email into the spam folder never to be seen again.
The other issue is competition, the average consumer receives so many emails that you need to constantly come up with attention grabbing subject lines (that don’t trigger the spam algo) to try and win over the attention and curiosity of the prospective customer – this is tough.
The average email achieves a 20% open rate.
Why SMS is better
Online SMS has an open rate of 97% – that means that virtually every single online SMS message you send out will be read.
That is almost a 5x increase in open rates, so you think if you were able to get 5x more people to open your SMS message that you could increase your sales?
3. No Spam Algorithm
One of the major contributors to the poor open rate of emails is the fact the spam algorithm’s have become incredibly sensitive.
SPAM algo’s were designed to reduce the number of scam or irrelevant emails landing inside the consumer inbox – as scammers become more sophisticated so to are the algo’s and unfortunately, legitimate businesses are seeing their emails go into the spam folder.
At our company we will even see order confirmations end up in spam – this is how crazy the algo’s have become.
Ever used the words “click here” inside your marketing email? Then there’s a good chance you are going straight into time out my friend – a lot of the words that we use in marketing are definitely worth avoiding.
Why SMS is better
Bulk SMS currently has no spam algorithm read through your text messages and deciding if it should go to the inbox or junk folder.
Obviously this is a double-edged sword for consumers and is why a small percentage of people use it to send spam text messages but for legitimate businesses this is an incredibly powerful opportunity to get all of your messages delivered.
4. Low Competition
I touched on this earlier but consumers are inundated with emails every single day, not just from other businesses but from work mates , friends and family.
It is an incredibly busy place inside an email inbox and so those are your competitors.
It is a mistake to think that you are just competing against other businesses inside your industry, this is narrow minded you are competing for a limited attention span of the consumer.
Why SMS is better
Consumers are forever shopping online or visiting interesting websites and blogs that have email capture forms which means they are handing out that email everywhere making it tougher and tougher to get their attention.
With online SMS there is very little competition at all. Most of the times there are text messages flying back and forth from friends and family and few from actual businesses asking them actually purchase products and services.
If you are able to get them onto your online SMS list then you have a captive audience where you get the same amount of attention as they would give to their friends and family.
5. Online SMS Has High Response Times
While working as an online marketer for a retailer we had a piece of tracking software that would allow us to see exactly which part of the country our customers were purchasing our products from.
We would send out 3-4 email marketing campaigns per day and is was cool to see the little blue circle pop up on the screen every now and then with new purchase orders.
Once we switched to using online SMS as well, and we sent out the same promotion via text message to our customers the entire screen would light up in blue circles, it was the craziest thing we had seen, this was proof that SMS was superior to email both in terms of actual sales volume but also in the time it took a person to buy once they had received our online SMS promotion.
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of email marketing but when it comes to generating massive open rates and noticeable gains in return on investment it is really tough to beat bulk SMS.
