SMS Vs Email Marketing: The Key Differences

As you take a look at all the marketing channels available to businesses nowadays, it is becoming challenging to know where to put your focus. Digital marketing campaigns are always changing but if we’re talking about the present, we believe that SMS and email marketing will stick around for a long time.

SMS marketing compared to email marketing is a relatively new marketing approach - as email marketing has been dominating for many years. However, differentiating the two and comparing their effectiveness will give you the information necessary to carry out an effective marketing strategy moving forward.

Today, we will be running through the key differences between SMS vs email marketing. Everything from the advantages and drawbacks associated with both, to how you can utilise these marketing methods to boast a higher earning potential and reach a wider audience. Read on to learn more!

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What Are the Main Differences in SMS vs Email Marketing?

If you’ve ever experimented with either of these marketing tools, you will understand that there are clear differences from testing out your luck. However, to break them down, here is a list of the main differences between SMS marketing vs email marketing:

Email marketing is via emails and SMS marketing is via text messaging
Email sequences will be longer in text than SMS marketing
Email marketing requires more creativity (design and branding) compared to SMS
You can send richer messages with more value using email marketing
SMS is more focused on the promotional side of marketing (offering discount codes, etc)

We would assess the most important difference between these two marketing methods being their length of writing. With emails, you can tailor your messages more effectively.

Let’s say you wanted to raise brand awareness, obtain reviews from your customers or inform them about a new product range coming out - email marketing would be the place to explain this long process.

On the other hand, with SMS marketing, the main goals of this short-length text are to offer discounts, flash sales, text-to-win competitions and many more promotional offers. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but both SMS and email marketing can be utilised to generate a hefty sum of revenue in your back-end marketing strategy.

DON'T MISS: 5 ways to rapidly build your SMS list

What Are the Advantages of Email and SMS?

As you compare the two closely, there are clear benefits to both marketing techniques that should not be overlooked. Evaluating each and taking the positives from them will give you everything you need to work closely on implementing a marketing strategy of your own into your company. Here are the advantages of both email and SMS marketing:

Benefits of Email Marketing

Email marketing campaigns are never limited in terms of the amount of text, videos, GIFs and images you can implement into your email template. This is perfect if you want to create a long-winded email marketing strategy that you aspire to connect with your audience.

Whether this be valuable/informational content, newsletters, or updates on your new product range - you will have full reigns in marketing that to them in the best way possible. Furthermore, images, GIFs, etc allow you to capture the attention of your customer with ease by breaking up the content into desired sections.

Email marketing can be used in an expansive number of ways. From welcoming your customers to ensuring people checkout from their abandoned carts to offering discounts and promoting brand awareness - there is no limit with these advantages of email marketing.

Benefits of SMS Marketing

The SMS marketing sector is slightly different from email marketing but has its unique features that can open new doors to revenue generation. One huge advantage of SMS marketing is that your text message marketing subscribers have to opt in by themselves - meaning they want to hear what you’re offering.

Although there is a 160 character limit on these text messages, you will only need a small character amount to offer discount codes, flash sales, text-to-win competitions, etc because your audience will be wanting/expecting these offers.

SMS messages are also personalised and feel like a tight-knit community that receives exclusive gifts based on their subscription. Therefore, the open rate and click-through rate are so high because text messages are so often read.

Short and straight-to-the-point text message marketing with a clear CTA (call-to-action) can be all you need to elevate your conversion rates to the next level.

DON'T MISS: How do I audit email/SMS marketing programs?

What Are the Disadvantages of SMS and Email Marketing?

Although these two are incredible in their own right, there are always pros and cons to everything if you’re going to assess them individually. Let’s take a closer look at the disadvantages of both email and SMS marketing campaigns:

Drawbacks of Email Marketing

If you’ve ever been a subscriber to a certain brand or business that you enjoy receiving promotional content from, you will often notice that you will begin receiving scam or spam emails a lot more frequently.

Luckily, your email account typically identifies these people and puts them in your spam folder, but it has been known that people have been scammed by emails before. They can either be time-consuming to deal with or if you fall for them, you could potentially lose a lot of money.

Being clever, recognising the spam and reporting it will be what your next steps need to be to prevent these people from spreading across other people’s email inboxes.

Drawbacks of SMS Marketing

Unlike email marketing, the 160 character limit can often be challenging to portray a message to your target audience - well, at least enough to persuade them to purchase. No GIFs, images, or videos can be posted on text messages either.

Another disadvantage of SMS marketing is that you should also refrain from sending bulk messages that don’t comply with the GDPR ruleset. If you send out too many messages at once, it can be flagged for spam.

Reading these rules will allow you to tailor your SMS marketing to something that will work for you. SMS marketing can sometimes seem limited but it is certainly a great asset for your marketing communications.

DON'T MISS: The levers to scale an email/SMS marketing strategy

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SMS and Email Marketing: Which Marketing Channel Should You Choose?

In regards to whether you should choose email marketing or SMS marketing for your business - we would recommend that pairing both together rather than separating them will give you the greatest chance of finding success when selling to your target market.

This shouldn’t be a dispute about which marketing channel is better because both have unique qualities that could seriously enhance your business performance. The short and snappy nature of SMS and the ability to be creative and broad with your emails is such a perfect marketing partnership.

If you’re looking to execute both of these into your current marketing strategy, contact our expert team here at Magnet Monster and we’ll more than happily help you with the next step of your journey!

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