Marketing experts have to strike a delicate balance between technological advancements and the changing habits of consumers. Old technologies find new life in modern campaigns and new technologies are leveraged in exciting ways to create diverse marketing strategies capable of reaching new audiences.
On the other hand, consumers are increasingly taking steps to protect their privacy online. In conjunction with Google’s plan to disable third-party cookies, marketers are looking to mitigate the fallout while adapting their use of existing technologies. Email marketing and SMS marketing campaigns have become the tools of choice to directly reach and communicate with leads.
As experts in helping B2B service providers craft and maintain powerful marketing strategies, UpCity has dug deeper into what marketers need to know about SMS marketing and email marketing strategies, including:
- Strengths and weaknesses of each tactic
- How best to leverage SMS and email in conjunction with one another
- When it’s best to use each tactic and when they should be avoided
- Alternatives to SMS and email marketing
- Tips for maximizing the effectiveness of SMS and email marketing campaigns
What are SMS and email marketing?
Crafting a well-balanced and diversified marketing strategy requires an understanding of the tools and tactics in play.
What is SMS marketing?
Short message service (SMS) marketing is an opt-in marketing method businesses use to leverage text messaging platforms in order to send communications and promotional materials to curated lead lists and existing customers.
There are a growing number of privacy-focused laws and regulatory requirements that govern how companies are allowed to leverage text messaging for marketing purposes. Failing to comply with these requirements in your SMS marketing can lead to fines, lawsuits, and damage to your brand reputation.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing allows businesses to reach a curated email list of leads and customers about your services and products, product launches, educational materials, and other content designed to increase engagement and conversion.
Emails can come in the form of email newsletters, transactional emails, retention emails, and promotional content. As with other types of communications, email marketing requires opt-in and the ability to opt-out, and is heavily governed by regulations and legal requirements.
How does SMS marketing compare to email marketing?
Before we discuss how these two marketing strategies work in conjunction with one another, it’s important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each marketing channel on their own.
The benefits of leveraging SMS and email marketing
Advantages of SMS marketing
A relatively new tool in the marketing landscape, SMS marketing is one of the most direct methods of contacting a lead or customer possible. Marketing through SMS often takes place over mobile devices, usage of which is up year-over-year in the last four years. Anyone who has ever gasped at their daily screen time report understands just how prevalent these devices have become in our daily lives.
This level of usage makes marketing over mobile devices extremely lucrative, especially as customer opt-in rates have increased over the last few years. This increase in access has led to some interesting advantages in leveraging SMS marketing, as revealed in a survey conducted by UpCity:
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- Consumers are extremely likely to open SMS marketing messages. More than a third of SMB marketing professionals surveyed reported an open rate of 41%-60%, while an additional 17% boasted SMS messaging open rates of at least 81 percent.
- SMS marketing is profitable. More than half of respondents reported an ROI for SMS marketing campaigns of $21-$40 per dollar spent.
- SMS marketing is extremely effective. Around 67% of respondents to the UpCity survey found SMS marketing campaigns to be at least moderately effective overall at reaching consumers and leads and increasing profitability.
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Additionally, SMS marketing campaigns don’t suffer from any sort of delivery delay. The messaging is delivered directly to a user’s phone and when they are accessed, they are opened quickly. Messaging delivered in this way is not only casual and conversational, but it’s also short and concise. These factors make SMS messaging easy to understand with even easier-to-follow calls-to-action.
Strengths of email marketing
A long-time workhorse leveraged by marketing professionals, email marketing is one of the most relied upon and ROI-positive marketing tactics in use. As part of the SMS survey, we asked respondents to compare the effectiveness of SMS to their email marketing efforts, and we discovered that email marketing campaigns come with some advantages:
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- Email marketing has an extremely reliable ROI. While around 50% of email marketing experts reported an ROI of $21-$40, an additional 27% reported an ROI of more than $41 per dollar spent.
- Email is reliable. Around 74% of email marketing respondents to our survey feel that email marketing campaigns are at least moderately effective.
- Average open rates are consistent. Roughly a third of marketing professionals surveyed in an UpCity study of email marketing boasted an open rate of 16%-20% with the right audience segmentation.
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The increased engagement with email marketing campaigns generates increases in website traffic and improved engagement with both existing and prospective customers. Email marketing is a flexible strategy that can be leveraged at multiple levels of the marketing funnel for different purposes and is seen to increase conversion rates and profitability as well as lead to repeat business and improved customer retention.
Drawbacks and shortcomings of SMS and email marketing campaigns
Weaknesses of SMS marketing
While it comes with increased visibility and access to consumers, there are some drawbacks to SMS marketing.
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- Limited ability to leverage visual media. While you are able to include images and short visual media, you’re limited to small file sizes, which limits the creativity you can fold into a marketing campaign.
- SMS is highly regulated. Acts such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act require compliance with opt-in and opt-out requirements, only executing campaigns during specific hours, and other limitations.
- Regardless of opt-in, mobile devices are a guarded communication channel. You have to find the right balance for your campaigns, as over-messaging can lead to leads opting out of your campaigns.
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Weaknesses of email marketing
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- Crafting campaigns can be time-consuming. Even with automation helping in audience segmentation and distribution, crafting targeted content for campaigns can take time and manpower away from other marketing channels.
- Email doesn’t help with brand recognition or brand awareness. While email marketing can help with engagement and improve overall brand loyalty, emails are distributed to curated lists of consumers who have already heard of your brand.
- You’re not building new business with emails, you’re nurturing existing leads. Although email campaigns might increase your customer base, emails aren’t often utilized in reaching new customers with fresh messaging.
- Poorly crafted email campaigns can damage your company’s reputation. Poorly designed emails and badly written content can both have a negative impact on how customers view your brand and whether they remain to engage with future outreach.
- It’s challenging to adhere to all of the laws and regulations governing email marketing. Depending upon the scope of your campaign and customer base, your brand might have to follow an array of both domestic and international laws pertaining to spam and mass mailings.
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How should SMBs use SMS and email marketing together as part of an omnichannel digital marketing strategy?
Modern digital marketing campaigns are more effective when they incorporate multiple tactics.
Hybrid strategies outperform the individual performance of SMS and Email campaigns
We explored the synergy between SMS and email marketing in detail in our SMS marketing survey and found that small businesses thrive when combining these tactics. You’ll recall above that 67% of marketing experts responding to our survey claimed that SMS campaigns were at least moderately effective.
We asked respondents how effective those same campaigns became when coupled with email marketing tactics. The results revealed that upwards of 76% of respondents who used both tactics consider these hybrid campaigns to be at least moderately successful.
Combining opted-in contact lists expands your messaging reach
Well-curated contact lists are invaluable for the success of SMS and email campaigns, as they are composed of leads and clients who have given your company permission to market to them. Because the opt-in agreements are generally for multiple marketing channels, your analytics tools will be able to create more robust audience segmentations and improve the customization of campaigns.
The combined reach of these two marketing channels can allow your team some flexibility in crafting campaigns. They can use the improved segmentation to determine which contacts are more susceptible to either marketing channel and expand the scope of a campaign. Alternatively, this allows the team to mix the two channels into a larger marketing funnel at different stages in the customer journey.
When should you use SMS marketing and when should you use email marketing?
Depending on the marketing objective, marketing experts can bounce between the two advertising channels to great advantage.
When leveraging email, you should be focused on non-urgent informational communications such as:
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- Delivering long-form content and newsletters
- Customer engagement
- Lead nurturing
- Educational information and social proof marketing
- Review solicitation
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Leveraging SMS allows your team to send out urgent or time-sensitive short-form communications focused on:
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- Confirmation of services and deliveries
- Appointment reminders or service reminders
- New product announcements and
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Tips for maximizing the effectiveness of SMS and email marketing
When you are looking to optimize either your SMS or email marketing campaigns, it’s important to follow best practices around each strategy to make sure you’re getting the most out of a given campaign.
For both marketing channels, you should have a strong understanding of your target audience and your overall marketing goals. This will help to align your efforts in both channels with your business needs and profitability targets.
SMS best practices
With SMS campaigns, you want to ensure you’re crafting effective messaging by focusing on identifying and showcasing your brand and avoiding coming across as spam. This means delivering meaningful links or offers to customers at the right time, rather than flooding your contacts with poorly thought-out content.
Timing and frequency are especially important for SMS messaging, and your strategies here can be honed with the incorporation of AI-powered chatbots and location-based geotargeting. The data and analytics generated from these systems will help improve engagement, click-through rates (CTR), and other KPIs. In turn, the data can be used to gauge the performance and impact of your campaign and allow you to modify your approach as needed.
Email best practices
Email marketing is becoming increasingly automated and supported by software or web applications. Because the mechanics of audience segmentation and scheduling mass mailings are largely handled within these frameworks, your team is free to focus on maximizing the impact of your email campaigns through improved content and messaging.
Not only should email content be well-crafted, you should also ensure that your messaging is consistent across campaigns and advertising mediums. The content should also be matched up to the campaign’s intent relative to the overall sales funnel. Personalized messaging should be paired with targeted calls to action appropriate for where the audience falls in the customer journey.
Marketing channels you should be using in addition to SMS and email marketing
Email and SMS campaigns can be likened to trawling for business with a wide, fine-meshed net. Such mass mailings and direct marketing broadcasts are useful, but serve a much different purpose than other marketing channels.
A mistake inexperienced or unsupported marketing teams often make is to not diversify their marketing spend enough to support an omni-channel marketing strategy. Rather than having to choose between channels, marketing experts and agencies are encouraged to fold in multiple tactics into a cohesive overall approach:
- Content marketing across social media, websites, blogs, and other digital content platforms
- Paid advertising across search engines and social media
- Traditional print and broadcast media marketing and direct mail
Mixing in SMS and email marketing diversifies and strengthens your digital marketing strategy
The synergy that can be achieved by integrating email marketing and SMS marketing into a cohesive campaign proves why it’s important for your marketing and advertising team to be versed in a wide range of both traditional and recent digital marketing strategies. While your SMB or startup might employ a skilled digital marketing expert, it’s likely they aren’t capable of keeping up with every digital marketing channel necessary to remain competitive.
Partnership with an agency or consultant specializing in digital marketing, especially email and SMS tactics, can provide your agency with access to the skills and bandwidth necessary to properly leverage digital marketing tools to achieve success and profitability.