What channel yields the best results? Social media vs Email vs SMS

Would you rather 20% of your customers read your message or 98%?

We know, probably not the most intelligent question to ask, of course you are going to pick 98%. It’s a bigger percentage, meaning more of your customers will read your message, and therefore more people will complete your desired action.

Now imagine if you could send an email, tweet, or post a message on Facebook and guarantee that 98% of your following or recipients would read it. Impossible right? Not impossible at all, very simple, send your customers an SMS and 98% of them will read your message.

So why with such a big open rate are millions of businesses still using social media or email to communicate with their customers and completely ignoring SMS?

Using social media and email are great ways to communicate with your audience, but even using these you won’t be able to reach all your customers, with only a fraction actually seeing your message.

It amazes us that businesses who have been trading for years are only now just looking to use SMS marketing. Maybe that is because SMS marketing is not as well-known as Twitter or Facebook, or even seen in the same light as email marketing which has been around for what feels like forever, but SMS is far more superior at communicating with your customers than other marketing channels.

consumers want businesses to use sms stat

Not only is it a highly effective way of communicating, but your customers also want to receive text messages too, with 75% of people wanting to have offers sent to them via SMS (Source: Digital Marketing Magazine). It really isn’t rocket science that you should be sending your customers text messages.

Even with these two great facts and many others, businesses will still choose social media over SMS, or first look at using their email marketing provider when looking to promote their offers, rather than sending the offer through SMS.

This is why we have looked into two of the biggest social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, along with email marketing, and comparing these channels to SMS. We have compared the number of posts/messages being sent out on each platform, with a look at how many people actually see these messages.

marketing channel stats

An interesting stat to take from the above image is that 23 million active users on Twitter are actually bots. That means a large proportion of your followers could be bots, meaning your tweets are being seen by even fewer people than you first thought.

Another take from the above image is that almost 50% of all emails are spam, that is an astonishingly high amount of spam. This may be the reason behind such a low number of emails being opened, consumers are fed up of all the spam and even if your marketing emails are amazing they are being ignored.

If you already use social media and email marketing to promote your content and connect with your customers, but still aren’t sure about SMS marketing, even after reading those great stats above, feel free to sign up for a free trial account with us. There are no commitments and no need to enter any payments details, we will give you 10 free credits to test with, we will walk you through the system if you would like, and let you use it at your pace.

We truly believe that all businesses should be using SMS, and we hope that you sign up and see it work wonders for yourself.