SMS vs. E-mail: How Many Emails People Get Every Day?

Irene Rufferty
BSG SMS
Published in
6 min readOct 4, 2017

Whether you love it or hate it, SMS vs. E-mail remains a vital issue in telecommunications since both are extremely useful business communication tools. Thus, an average office worker checks out his/her e-mail about 75 times a day! Imagine how many letters people get via the Internet in general. So, let’s figure it out if there’s still an advantage of e-mails over SMS messaging.

E-mail Statistics

Only in 2015 about 205.6 billion emails were sent and received globally every day. Up till now the figure may already be estimated as 6.2 trillion emails sent worldwide in a thirty-day period and is approximately equal to 74–75 trillion emails sent within the last year around the globe. WOW.

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Also, there are approximately 2.6 billion email clients. Together, they possess more than 4.3 billion email accounts — a proportion of 1.7 email accounts for each client.
These clients get a normal amount of 88 messages every day, yet they just send 34 messages for each day. That implies individuals are getting more than 2.5X a bigger number of messages than they’re sending!

Therefore, often a question arises: which marketing tool is better to use, which’s worth investing and spending advertising budget? This question also concerns the decision-making when choosing the channel of communication with the clients. Which is better: SMS or E-mail newsletters?

Since every business has its own specifics, certain goals and strategies, some doubts still emerge in the process of work. So, in order to choose the right tool for your business, you need to objectively evaluate all the advantages and disadvantages of both SMS and E-mail marketing.

E-mail Marketing: Pros and Cons

The truth is that the use of email marketing is now at its peak, though SMS can definitely outrun it according certain criteria. Nevertheless, a huge number of businesses use e-mail letters to increase sales, customer loyalty and establish communication with their customers, and thus, potential consumers of their goods and services.

Top 10 Advantages of E-mailing

  • Low cost on sending, traffic payments.
  • Stimulating conversion to the site by placing links in the text body.
  • The ability to send several types of letters to interact with the audience (information, product, service, advertising, news, returning mailing).
  • Sending useful and fan content holds the readers, and product advertising motivates them to use your services further on
  • Unlimited number of characters in the letter.
  • The ability to add useful content (video, audio, photos) to the letter to attract more readers.
  • The ability to arrange the letters in any way to visualize the main message.
  • Ability to add a logo to increase the brand awareness.
  • Allowing the users to unsubscribe from the newsletter if needed.
  • Full delivery report. Integration with Google Analytics to analyze the links and the user behavior.
  • With the help of the high-quality and regular mailing, you will be able to build a brand, position the mission of the company and your own expertise to win the customers.

5 Main Disadvantages of Email Marketing

  • Only 50% of users check mail every day and open promotional letters.
  • Statistics of opening letters depends on the quality of the title and the letter subject. Since the message is read only when it is opened, and the number of incoming messages is usually large enough, the probability that the user will open your email is still not high enough.
  • The number of customers involved from the email and the number of visits to your site depends directly on the quality of copywriting. In order for the newsletter to be memorable and effective, you will need a competent specialist who is well versed in the features of composing emails in the email format.
  • Lack of the Internet at hand. The users cannot check email regularly. Since the letters may accumulate, your letter can be simply deleted before you even know that it has ever come.
  • The presence of spam filters that filter out all suspicious messages, etc.

Email-messaging is an excellent advertising tool for boosting sales. Its use helps build relationships with the customers at a confidential and a more trusted level. The alternation of advertising, news and useful materials opens up the prospects for your business popularity growth.

Bulk messaging continues to be popular, as it is a convenient tool for instant communication with the customers. Moreover, SMS messaging has more advantages over an email marketing. Let’s consider them too:

10 Beneficial Advantages of SMS for Your Business

  • In most cases, mobile phones are at hand, and they are used by a large part of the population even on the move.
  • You do not need any Internet connection to read SMS.
  • The message is viewed immediately after it is received. Information that you want to inform your regular or potential client of will be read as soon as possible.
  • There’s no way for SMS marketing without being laconic. It is better to describe you a service or a product and attract a client in 2–3 sentences.
  • In abundance of promotional materials that clients receive daily, SMS is especially important in marketing strategy.
  • Distribution of information, news and service messages for regular interaction with the mobile users is easy with SMS.
  • It’s easy to send. You do not need to prepare the templates, develop a corporate style, spend money on design of the layout, etc. Just prepare the text of the message and send it.
  • Saves time for business representatives. Sending messages to your entire client base will take no more than 5 minutes, while preparing a quality email, designing it and writing a quality text will take at least a day.
  • Ability to integrate SMS distribution into software.
  • The maximum percentage of message delivery and the availability of a delivery report for each SMS.

4 Main Disadvantages of SMS Marketing

  1. The text of a single SMS may be only 160 Latin characters or 70 characters in Cyrillic, which does not always provide an opportunity to fully describe beneficial proposal. If the number of characters is exceeded, the cost of SMS increases.
  2. Mobile users rarely have a chance to unsubscribe from SMS.
  3. No visualization and design are available, only text, the alpha name of the sender, a link to your site and the contacts.
  4. Often mobile users treat SMS messages as spam and do not open them.

There are 3 amazing facts that prove the effectiveness of SMS marketing:

90% of messages are read in the first 3 minutes.

On average, a person looks at his/her phone 50 times a day, which increases the chances of quickly viewing your SMS.

98% reads of SMS in comparison with 20% of Emails and 12% of Facebook posts.

SMS-mailing is a popular marketing tool both offline and online. Sending service messages, informing about the delivery, availability of goods in the warehouse, notification of promotions, trade offers, the performance of services, etc. becomes much faster and more convenient using SMS messages, i deed.

Supermarkets, beauty parlors, car dealerships, restaurants, travel agencies and other businesses use newsletters for regular communication with their customers.

In Conclusion

Looks like the clash of the titans, eh? The truth is that both SMS and E-mail marketing tools are in high demand, depending on what your business and marketing team needs at the moment.

And of course, both SMS and E-mail messaging have their advantages and disadvantages. Analyzing them, you will be able to determine which advertising tool will be more effective for your business in your particular case in this or that situation. It’s strongly recommended using these two tools together for the ultimate success, as they will perfectly complement each other in your marketing strategy.

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