How much time do you spend on your mobile phone? One hour, two hours, three hours? Or maybe so many hours that you can’t even keep track. Mobile devices are no longer your gadgets only. They have acquired new meaning in your life and have become a lifestyle. From staying connected with your social circle to managing your health, it is part of every single aspect of your life. Leveraging this fact, marketers have turned to direct advertising of their products and services that land directly in the inbox of consumers; yes we are talking about email and SMS marketing.
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What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that allows you to market your product, service, or any update directly in the mails of your customers. It lets you connect with those customers who are already interested in your offering but just need a push or a reminder that you exist. You can generate great ROIs by incorporating email marketing in your overall marketing campaign.
What is SMS Marketing?
As the name suggests, it is a type of marketing that marketers use to promote their products or services via text. SMS marketing is usually used when marketers have to send time-sensitive offers and updates to their customer base. Or when they have to send out an alert. The target audience which receives texts are people who have given consent to receive these messages.
Sms Marketing Vs Email Marketing – Who is the Winner?
If you ask any marketeer which marketing strategy works the best when it comes to direct marketing, they will probably freeze on this question. And the reason is simple. Many marketers are asking this question themselves. It has become a conundrum for them. Sms Marketing or Email Marketing. Which one to choose? Consumers come across infinite ads every day on every digital platform. This is why marketers are always looking for ways to win the attention of their audience by utilizing the right strategy and platform. Let’s look at the features that make both of these marketing different from each other.
Open rate: Text messages tend to get opened more than email, indicating that SMS marketing is more reliable if you want to increase traffic.
Click Through Rate (CTR): Since the open rate tends to be more for SMS marketing, CTR is also high, making it a viable option for your marketing strategy.
Deliverability: Many emails directly go into spam while SMS is less likely to be marked as spam which ensures high deliverability for SMS.
Visibility: Email is used more often by companies than SMS marketing. Since there is less number of SMS marketing products or services, in your audience’s inbox, you can easily stand out among your competitors. The less taken road can be your way towards successful marketing.
Response: it takes only a few seconds to text back while it can take a lot longer than this, maybe days or weeks, to see an email and respond to it. Therefore, your email marketing might not have a good response rate as compared to your SMS marketing.
Which one is more effective?
Asking which marketing strategy is more effective is like asking which fruit is healthier; banana or apple. Both fruits are healthy and provide the nutritional value of their own. A banana cannot do what’s apple does and vice versa. The same is the case here. While it may seem at first and with our above-mentioned comparison list, that SMS marketing is more effective than email marketing, that’s actually not the case. Each form of marketing is beneficial and the best pick. It’s just their benefits differ from each other. Let’s look at the benefits of each marketing form.
Email Marketing Benefits
Email marketing gives enormous room for creativity, giving you an opportunity to show your brand’s personality. You can design your email based on your theme color and fonts, and incorporate visuals to support your content. When it comes to content, you craft convincing story-oriented copies or can only include Call to Actions, the choice is yours.
SMS Marketing Benefits
SMS marketing requires no long copies to make your promotional campaign attractive. There is no need to put your design skill to the test as SMS marketing consists of plain text with convincing short messages. With just a few strong words, you can gauge your audience’s attention. Sms marketing also offers higher CTR and open rate. You are likely to have a higher chance of having your promotional campaign seen via SMS than email.
Conclusion
Where Email marketing allows you to market your products or service in an utmost creative manner, SMS marketing promises you more engagement by having higher open rates. But, if your customer base is rich with those who appreciate aesthetics and are more attracted to visual content, email marketing would be the best way to go. So to decide the winner of 2022; the ultimate decision can only be drawn based on what exactly you are marketing and your business type.