The Benefits of Combining SMS and Email Marketing 

Traditional marketing methods have paved the way for digital marketing, which now takes precedence in businesses’ marketing expenditure. Amongst the most popular digital channels are email and SMS, with many companies using these to communicate with customers. Yet, they often do so in a disjointed manner, while combining these can benefit companies immensely. 

This article will help you understand the value of integrating your SMS and email marketing channels. First, we’ll delve into what SMS and email marketing are and how they differ. Then, we’ll describe how synchronizing the two can complement your marketing efforts and help you generate profits. 

What Is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing involves sending text messages to customers, usually limited to 160 characters. You can use these to deliver promotions, personalized offers, and alerts. With over 5 billion people receiving text messages—and 90% of these read within three minutes—SMS marketing is a highly coveted marketing channel. Moreover, it can generate hefty profits: a study by Attentive Mobile revealed that 60% of marketers state that SMS marketing has “significantly or overwhelmingly increased revenue generation.”

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing involves promoting your products or services via email and includes campaigns such as welcome emails, seasonal emails, newsletters, and product announcements. Emails, like SMS messages, have a great reach, with more than 4.1 billion current email users. Additionally, it is highly profitable. Leveraged the right way, email marketing can result in an ROI of 4400%. Given its lucrativeness, 79% of B2B marketers claim email as their most effective demand generation tool.

Differences Between SMS and Email Marketing

While SMS and email are both powerful marketing channels, understanding how they differ reveals their best use cases. Moreover, becoming aware of their strengths and weaknesses allows you to create a synergetic multichannel strategy that complements both channels. 

Emails are a great marketing medium for descriptive messages with images or attachments. As emails allow you to send longer messages, they also facilitate more conversion possibilities than text messages. Moreover, emails are a great way to solidify your branding, enabling you to incorporate your brand’s style, logo, and voice into your message’s layout. Doing this on text would be challenging given text messages’ limitations. Therefore, you can use email marketing to generate, inform, and nurture leads while breeding familiarity.

On the contrary, SMS messages are better-suited for short, time-sensitive messages. They have a response time of 90 seconds (as opposed to 90 minutes with emails) and don’t require WiFi. As such, you can use SMS marketing to ensure your messages are read promptly. However, their character limit means you have to carefully optimize your messages for creativity and sharpness while still inspiring action. 

Despite their differences, email and SMS marketing share some similarities, including easy automation, sky-high ROIs, and customizability. Combining their strengths and contextual differences can take your multichannel strategy to the next level. Together, these channels deliver robust communications that resonate with customers’ needs and facilitate close-knit relationships. Pairing these channels also gives rise to some additional benefits. 

Benefit #1: Increase Your Cross-Channel Subscribers 

With few subscribers to your marketing channels, investing a lot of effort into crafting the perfect messages is pointless. Thankfully, you can leverage your email and SMS channels to gain cross-channel subscribers. That is, you can convince your email subscribers to become SMS subscribers (and vice versa). As your email and SMS subscribers have already shown an interest in you, cross-promoting your marketing channels can grow your subscribers exponentially with minimal effort. 

For example, you can send your SMS subscribers short, catchy messages that describe the value of subscribing to your emails. These messages can include an incentive such as a discount or promotion. You can also long-form content on your emails to highlight the benefits of joining your SMS subscriber list. 

Benefit #2: Gain Complementary Customer Insights 

Today’s data-driven world allows you to check customers’ online behaviours to pinpoint their needs and pain points. This also means that competition is increasingly fierce, as your competitors can also target customers more effectively. As such, you must gather as much customer knowledge to stay ahead of the competition. 

A well-rounded strategy that incorporates email and SMS can provide you with actionable marketing analytics. For example, you can determine what type of (online or offline) content customers engage with most. This information can tell you whom you need to target, how your target audience likes to be reached, and how they interact with multiple touchpoints. Consequently, you can create a multichannel strategy that is timely, relevant, and highly appealing to customers.  

Benefit #3: More Personalized Communications 

You can use the data you’ve obtained from your SMS and email outreaches to segment and target your users appropriately. Dividing your target audiences into distinct groups allows you to send personalized messages across your channels, creating a unified multichannel strategy. 

Such tailored messages have become essential to companies that want to succeed in the age of hyper-personalization. Currently, 80% of customers prefer to buy from brands that provide customized purchase experiences. Consequently, personalized outreaches result in an ROI of $20 for every $1 spent.

Benefit #4: Cost-Effective 

Cost-effectiveness is one of the most compelling benefits of integrating your email and SMS marketing. While the cost of SMS marketing depends on the country you operate in and the number of texts you send, SMS marketing is amongst the cheapest forms of marketing available. Depending on your goals and campaign requirements, monthly SMS marketing prices can be as cheap as $50/month.

Email marketing is also a profitable marketing channel. While it may seem expensive at first—with prices ranging between $9-$1000 per month for a mid-sized company—a well-designed email marketing campaign can increase your revenue and grow your conversion rates, engagement, and website traffic. As such, a highly coordinated SMS and email marketing strategy can cut costs and deliver outstanding returns on your investment.

Benefit #5: Helps You Adapt to Our Mobile-First World 

Customers’ shift toward online shopping has resulted in a parallel increase in mobile phone usage. Currently, half of the web traffic across the globe comes from mobile devices, with US adults spending close to three hours on their mobile phones daily. 

With the use of smartphones rising worldwide, companies are resorting to mobile marketing to reach customers. As you can send both email and SMS marketing on mobile devices, you can leverage SMS messages and mobile-optimized emails into a single marketing campaign to create a cohesive multichannel strategy. Coordinating these channels can help you increase conversions while moving mobile leads down the sales funnel.

With iwinBACK’s automation platform, you can effortlessly empower your multichannel strategy by integrating your email and SMS marketing efforts. Get started today!