The benefits of SMS marketing: 20 reasons to use text messages in your campaigns

December 26, 2023

Today’s consumers are inundated with ads. They’re bombarded by banner ads on Google, sponsored social media posts, and paid ads in their email inboxes. And that’s discounting the billboards, TV ads, and print placements that are a part of daily life. It’s a lot. 

There are two ways you can look at this: 

1. There are more opportunities than ever to reach potential customers (a plethora of platforms means you can essentially reach anyone at any time)
2. There’s a growing need to break through the noise (because standing out is getting harder as consumers become ad-blind) 

While both are true, the emphasis should be on intentionally reaching customers where they aren’t getting saturated with marketing messages.

Enter SMS marketing. 

With sky-high open and response rates, text message marketing is a great way to break through the noise. But it’s so much more than just a fast way to reach your customers. It’s a sophisticated communication channel rooted in trust, reciprocity, and results.

In short, SMS marketing is extremely effective.

Here are just a few reasons why your organization could benefit from the wide range of advantages SMS marketing has to offer.

Benefits of SMS marketing:

1. Businesses that text are 217% more successful.
2. SMS open rates are as high as 98%.
3. SMS conversion rates are as high as 45%.
4. 70% of consumers subscribe to SMS marketing messages from businesses.
5. SMS opt-ins are growing 12% year over year.
6. Send as many as 500 text messages for just $29.
7. SMS messages are typically delivered within five seconds.
8. 98% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent.
9. 32% of people reply to text messages within 1-2 minutes.
10. Communicate to groups without reply all and provide 1-on-1 sales and support.
11. Subscribers opt in so you have access to an engaged audience.
12. Measuring success is easy with SMS marketing tools like SimpleTexting.
13. SMS marketing easily complements other existing marketing efforts like promotions.
14. SMS marketing is an easy channel to start.
15. Texting complements multi-channel campaign experiences like website, email, and social media.
16. Unlike email marketing, SMS marketing requires no coding or design experience.
17. Unlike social media and organic search engine optimization, there is no ever-changing algorithm that impacts how your message reaches your audience.
18. There is no spam inbox. Your audience opts in, so they want your messages.
19. Texting is quick to set up, meaning there is lower risk for experimentation.
20. 90% of businesses that text report success.

Recommended Reading: What are the pros and cons of SMS marketing?

Businesses that text customers with an SMS marketing platform are 683% more likely to report marketing success than those that don’t text customers.

Look, we know text marketing isn’t the only channel you should use to communicate with your audience. Text messaging, though, presents a very effective (and simple) way to connect with a highly-engaged audience — helping you create a high-performing multi-channel marketing strategy.

You might have written the best marketing message in the world, but if no one sees it, does it even matter? Luckily, SMS open rates continually sit at around 98% which is considerably higher than any other direct marketing strategy, including emails (16.97%) and push notifications (4.3%). 

There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, text messages nestle against updates from friends and family, which lends them an extra layer of familiarity. Secondly, they show up in personal inboxes — a space that consumers are far more likely to check regularly (47% of Gen Z check messages once every 10-30 minutes).

Not only are your texts statistically more likely than your emails to be opened, but SMS campaigns are also more likely to produce results. In our latest SMS survey, 91% of participants said they saw higher conversion rates in campaigns that include SMS. 

One brand, Whisker Seeker, routinely sees a 25% conversion rate on its SMS promotions. Founder Matt Davis wanted to bake SMS into an existing comms campaign to reach more customers on a personal level.

Matt sets expectations early: “We let our customers know we’ll text them a minimum of once a month and during holidays three times a month. So we’re upfront with how many times we’re going to text them.”

But the main SMS use case for Whisker Seeker is its monthly MegaDeal promotion. Each month, the brand pushes out a site-wide promotion via text message which builds anticipation and, as a result, generates more conversions. 

As a business texting company, one of the most common questions we get is, “Do my customers actually want me to text them?”

Well, good news: As of 2024, 79% of consumers subscribe to SMS marketing messages from businesses, which represents a 12% growth in opt-in rates year over year.

So, yes, your customers are tuned in and open to getting your texts. All you have to do is send them.

Thanks to a little something known as compliance, all of your contacts must give you express written consent to receive messages. On the upside, this means that your text audience is filled with people who actively want to engage with your brand.

These are people who have chosen to hand over their phone numbers in exchange for regular messages — they want to hear from you. 

You can maintain this level of activeness by creating a stellar experience for each customer by categorizing them based on their interests, past purchases, and loyalty levels, personalizing your messages to them, and serving content that has a much higher chance of getting results. 

Text messages cost pennies to send, and plans can be scaled up or down at any time to fit your needs.

Each platform has its own rates, but with SimpleTexting, you can send 500 SMS messages for $29. As we already mentioned, the average conversion rate of texts ranges from 25 to 45%.  

If your business profits $10 per order and you send a text blast to 500 contacts, you’ll generate $1,250 in revenue with a 25% conversion rate. That’s a huge ROI of 4,210%.

Text marketing makes it easy to see the fruits of your labor. With analytics showing you click-through rates (CTR), you can watch your campaigns play out in real-time.

Thanks to features like link shortening and tracking, it’s also easy to place a link with a custom UTM right in your text so you can directly measure the outcome of your campaign without any room for ambiguity.

SMS providers like SimpleTexting provide analytics tools to help you measure your text marketing’s success.

Unlike other mobile messaging platforms, SMS marketing is the only way to both chat individually with customers and send group messages without using a reply-all feature.

This makes it a versatile platform that can be used for sales, customer service or support, and internal communications all in one. 

Take Pallas Seeds, for example. The family business struggled to reach its growers quickly and efficiently via traditional, time-consuming methods like phone calls.

With SMS marketing, Pallas Seeds can send group messages to its growers in bulk or communicate one-on-one with individual growers. This has allowed co-founder Cale Pallas to create meaningful conversations about each customer’s specific needs.

A single SMS message or auto-reply is typically delivered within five seconds of being sent. How’s that for speed? Not to mention, 98% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent.

The instant form of communication lends itself perfectly to time-sensitive deals, flash sales, or one-off promos. 

Lighthouse Dental Care uses this to its advantage to send timely reminders, update appointments, and reach no-show customers in seconds. The team uses templates to speed up the process and ensure they’re landing in customer inboxes exactly when they need to without taking too much time out of the team’s day-to-day activities.

SMS marketing makes the perfect complement to your existing marketing tools or tactics — whether you want to combine SMS and social media or complement email marketing with text messaging.

Through native integrations or third-party tools like Zapier, you can automate your way through anything by pairing it with texting.

For example:

• Send abandoned cart texts based on your e-commerce platform activity
• Sync calendars with text reminders
• Add new email contacts directly from text message submissions

Another huge benefit of SMS marketing is that text messages don’t require design or development work. With emails and other forms of direct marketing, you often need to build templates and make sure they work on different email clients, which can take a ton of time and have less-than-stellar results if you’re not tech-minded.

Texts are different. They’re stripped of any coding or dev requirements — it’s basically the same as sending your mom a quick update. Basically, you don’t need to have a creative eye or any specialist skills to send well-received messages to your audience.

Social media is notorious for giving brands whiplash with its constantly changing algorithms and updates. It’s a similar story with search engine optimization.

What worked one day might not work the next, and if you’re not careful, you could find yourself on an endless carousel of trying to keep up.

Luckily, there’s no such struggle with SMS marketing. There’s no ever-changing algorithm to worry about — your messages will always show up at the top of someone’s inbox regardless of the keywords you use or the tactics you implement.

A series of A/B tests that pitted messages with and without multimedia elements against each other found that texts that include pictures generate a higher CTR. While you don’t need any design skills to send an SMS campaign, you’re not limited to pure text. 

Thanks to MMS, you can include all kinds of rich media such as photos, videos, GIFs, and audio files. You can even type up to 1,600 characters of text.

Matt Davis of Whisker Seekers is a firm advocate of adding photos to text blasts and regularly adds them to his monthly MegaDeal promotions to boost CTR.

Whisker Seekers adds photos to its MegaDeal drops each month. 

A recent study found that as many as 85% of emails end up in the spam folder. This is precisely why there are regulations around text marketing. It’s a trusted inbox, and no one wants to see it fall to the same fate as email. 

This is also a benefit for brands that prioritize express written consent. You don’t have to fear your messages being lost in the void once they’re sent. In other words, there is no spam folder for SMS.

Note: People can report spam texts when businesses message them without their opt-in consent. This is good for businesses that play by the rules.

Text message campaigns come with a low price tag. Unlike large media campaigns that use social ads, PPC, and traditional print advertisements, SMS marketing starts as little as $29 a month to reach your customers exactly when you need to. 

And, when the cost is low, so is the risk. You can experiment with different types of messages, different sending times, and various templates without breaking the bank and use your findings to refine your campaigns.

For such a modest investment, texting can be a great additional channel to support your marketing success.

Consumers are lightning-fast at checking their text messages. In fact, 80% of people check incoming texts within five minutes.

You can almost guarantee the vast majority of recipients will have read your message within half an hour of you sending it — ideal for timely messages and promos.

The response rates are even better. 32% of people reply to text messages within 1-2 minutes, with a further 45% replying within 5-10 minutes.

If you want a reply, SMS marketing is the way to go, whether it’s feedback you’re looking for, an appointment confirmation, or you simply need someone to update their details.

There are plenty of ways for customers to get in touch with brands these days, but text messages remain a firm favorite. 33% of consumers prefer to text a business when they have a question or an inquiry because it’s seen as the quickest and easiest way to get in touch.

Adding text to your customer service communications can help you solve issues faster, answer common questions, and maintain high customer satisfaction levels.

Text messages are simple but versatile. They lend themselves to a multitude of different use cases, from customer support questions to feedback forms and promo campaigns.

When we asked companies what they primarily use SMS for in their campaigns, we received a wide range of responses: 

• 57% use them for customer satisfaction surveys and review requests
• 50% use them for appointment and reservation reminders
• 39.5% use them for billing and collections 
• 37.3% use them for customer service purposes
• 33.8% use them for new offerings and announcements 
• 29.8% use them for shipping notifications 
• 25.8% use them for special offers, promos, and sales alerts
• 12.5% use them for running sweepstakes and contests

As you can see, there are a whole host of different ways you can incorporate SMS marketing into your existing campaigns or run one-off campaigns to generate more sales. 

Sharing digital real estate with a consumer’s family and friends is a high accolade. Text messages let you land directly in people’s inboxes where they’re already having one-on-one conversations with their nearest and dearest.

This presents the perfect opportunity to establish a rapport and build deeper connections with your best customers. Plus, you can personalize messages based on customer interests and other attributes to build long-term loyalty.

If you snooze, you lose.

There’s a good chance your competitors are already using SMS marketing to connect with their customers and, if you don’t jump on the bandwagon, you could miss out.

There was a 56% increase in SMS adoption rates from 2022 to 2023 and 79% of consumers have already subscribed to receive text messages from their favorite businesses in 2024. 

These benefits show it’s a no-brainer to incorporate SMS into your campaigns. As well as impressive open rates and conversion rates, text messages provide a great opportunity to connect with your customers and create a personalized experience for each individual.

SMS marketing’s versatility means you can use text messages in all sorts of situations, from review requests and appointment reminders to launching promos and answering customer questions.

Ready to get started? Enjoy all these benefits and more with SimpleTexting’s free, 14-day trial.  Send a text to yourself today to see how it works.