Move Over Email, SMS is the New King of Marketing

Email once reigned as king as the best way for brands to communicate with their customers. But as people shift to spending most of their time on their mobile devices, rather than their computers, SMS marketing has risen to reign supreme.

These days, email inboxes are saturated with spam emails. Many people delete marketing emails before even reading them. But, when people receive text messages, they read over 98% of them. Additionally, over 90% of these messages are read within three minutes. By keeping messages short and sweet, brands can cater their SMS marketing to their customers’ and ever shortening attention spans.

People on average check their SMS messages over 150 times each day. That’s one of the main reasons that SMS marketing is eight times more effective than email marketing. By personalizing messages and keeping words brief, people can engage directly with your brand in the way that is most comfortable to them.

The return rates on SMS marketing messages are even higher among loyal customers. 76% of loyalty program members prefer to communicate via SMS rather than email and over half of customers are more likely to buy something if they receive a personalized text message about a product.

While there still will be a time and a place for email marketing with brands, direct SMS with customers is rising among consumers as an expectation. In order to compete with other brands, companies will need to adapt to this individualized form of communication.