Text Marketing Vs. Email Marketing: Which Packs a Bigger Punch? [Infographic]

Updated January 20th, 2023

As a business owner, odds are you’re already familiar with email marketing. You likely use this mass communication method to grow your business, whether it’s to promote special offers, advertise new products, or even send out a monthly newsletter.

But here’s a question to consider: have you ever thought about giving text message marketing a try? This method is one of the most affordable and immediate mobile communication tactics out there. Plus, 98% of text messages are read within the first 3 minutes of sending, and 85% of customers prefer receiving a text over an email or phone call.

Text Marketing vs. Email Marketing Infographic

It can be difficult to know where your marketing dollars will be best spent, and when you own a business, you certainly don’t want to waste money trying a new tactic you’re not sure of. When it comes to text marketing vs. email marketing, it can be helpful to compare the facts side-by-side to know which method will be best for you.

Here are key metrics to look at when you’re trying to choose a mass communication method for your marketing plan — plus, our text and email marketing infographic with all of the most important statistics to keep in mind.

Text marketing vs. email marketing infographic summary

1. The average open rate for email is between 28%-33%, according to Hubspot.
2. Conversely, 99% of all text messages are read.
3. A recent study released by Hubspot suggests that open rates for emails gradually increase with the amount of campaigns sent.
4. Companies that send 16-30 email campaigns a month see a CTR more than 2X greater than those that send two or fewer campaigns a month.
5. Text marketing preaches exclusivity. Ideally, you should be able to get your point across with 4-6 text campaigns per month. Sending more can come across as obnoxious or spammy.
6. Gone are the days of text-only messages. Users can now fire out MMS messages to entice offer redemption. Text marketing appeals to the visually-minded subscriber.
7. The average email CTR sits at 6%-7%.
8. The average text marketing CTR sits at about 36%.

At SlickText, we always recommend expanding your marketing web of communication.

1. If someone opts out of one channel, you can still reach them with another.
2. You can also bridge age gaps and meet communication preferences of multiple targets.
3. Finally, you can form campaigns that focus on one cohesive message.

Top 3 text marketing campaign ideas

1. Offer a mobile coupon: Sending promotional messages is the most common text marketing tactic. Send out a message that reads something like “20% off storewide sale, today and tomorrow only! Show this text to receive your discount.”
2. Capture emails with one simple text message: Remember how we mentioned the importance of building a marketing web of communication? SlickText offers an email capture feature. Grow your email marketing list with one simple broadcast text campaign.
3. Run a text-to-win contest: Text-to-win contests are easily the quickest way to grow your list. Encourage new subscribers to text in for a chance at winning a grand prize. Make sure the prize is appealing to all potential opt-ins.

Open rates for text and email marketing

An open rate is just what it sounds like — a measure of how often your message is opened. Getting people to actually look at what you send them can be tough. How many times have you personally just deleted branded messages when they come to your inbox?

According to the latest research, text message open rates are at 99%. When you think about it, that sort of makes sense. How often do you delete a text message without at least looking at it first? Email, on the other hand, doesn’t fare as well. Companies typically guard their open rates religiously, but according to HubSpot, the average open rate for emails is only 21%. With email inboxes becoming more and more cluttered, your message probably gets deleted without even being read first.

Click-through rates for text marketing vs. email marketing

Not only do you want your audience to open your message, but you want them to click through to whatever call-to-action you’ve indicated. A click-through rate measures how often they do this to see how effective your messaging is.

With email, research shows that you need to send many emails to increase your click-through rate. Companies that send 16 to 30 campaigns a month see a click-through rate two times greater than average. That’s basically sending a campaign every day. That’s a lot of emails, and a lot of time spent writing them.

On the other hand, text marketing favors exclusivity. Best practice guidelines indicate you should be able to convey your point with just four to six campaigns a month, which is essentially a text or two per week.

When it comes down to it, the average click-through rate for email is between 6% to 7%. The average click-through rate for text marketing is about 36%. With text marketing, you send way fewer messages — and do much less work — for a far greater impact than email marketing.

Is email marketing still valuable?

Don’t stress about scrapping your entire email marketing plan just yet. Although email marketing is less effective than text marketing, you’ll observe powerful results when pairing this old-school method with mass text messaging.

We’re not telling you to ditch email marketing, because you should never rely on only one tactic to grow your business. Instead, adopt multiple strategies that make sense for your customers and the designated product or service. And for most people, that means bringing text marketing into the equation.

Getting started with text message marketing

After seeing the metrics that clearly indicate text messaging’s potential, you might be wondering how to get started with an SMS text blast service. Here are four recommendations for getting started with mass text messaging.

1. Offer a mobile coupon

Offering a mobile coupon or text promotion is the most common way to use mass text messaging. It can drive traffic to your store and entice buyers to make a real-time purchase decision, helping you move whatever inventory you need to. All you have to do is offer a discount on a purchase, but you don’t have to rely just on text! You can use an MMS message, which includes an image and appeals to the visually-minded customers out there.

2. Capture emails with a simple text

It’s important to bring customers into your marketing ecosystem, which will probably include a mix of text marketing and email marketing. To grow your email list and pair the two, use a simple text to get customers to sign up for emails from you. An easy email capture feature is provided by SlickText, so you can get your marketing streams to work together for your benefit. Other list growth tools, like custom QR codes or web popups, can be sent via SMS or put on your website, and direct users to web forms that collect email and other personal information.

3. Run a sweepstakes

Text-to-win sweepstakes are the quickest way to grow your list, because everybody loves free stuff. Encourage new subscribers to text in to win a grand prize or a giveaway, but make sure the deal is sweet enough to encourage signups. A really great prize that your customers can’t resist will drive opt-ins, and before you know, it you’ll have an engaged text marketing list that you built from scratch.

4. Automate your campaigns

In order to succeed at text message marketing at scale, you should consider automating as many elements of your strategy as possible. These days, it’s entirely possible to engage at scale with automated sequences. You don’t need any coding experience to do so, and our platform can intelligently detect chat sentiment, so it can respond to your audience with appropriate replies — or forward the chat to a customer support specialist for additional follow-up.

Text and email marketing: which should you choose?

When it comes to deciding between text and email marketing, you’ll need to evaluate both on the basis of their metrics and what works with your customer base. Instead of trying to choose one over the other, we recommend an integrated plan where you use both marketing methods together. This strategy brings customers into your brand’s ecosystem and gives them multiple touch points to develop a relationship with your business.

Ready to partner up with the industry-leading business text marketing platform? Start your free trial with SlickText, or give us a call today to learn more about how we can help you grow your business.