SMS and Email Marketing: How to Combine Strategies to Reach More Customers

Combining SMS and email marketing into an omnichannel strategy can significantly improve your campaign’s results. Emails are best for longer, scrollable content, while SMS focuses on short-form transactional content. Coordinating both allows you to leverage the strengths of each channel to maximize your campaign’s impact.

From increasing deliverability to boosting content ROI and improving personalization per customer journey, learn how this orchestration can better support your bottom line. 

SMS and Email Marketing: Benefits of Integrating Multi-Channel Strategies for Your Bottom Line

There are several advantages to integrating your SMS and email marketing strategies. Here’s how a multi-channel approach can reach more of your customers.

Expanded Market Reach

Most consumers nowadays own a smartphone and check their texts at least 11 times daily within a minute of receiving them. They’re not only using it to browse on social media but also to make informed purchase decisions when shopping online. 

The conversational nature of text message marketing even encourages 63% of consumers to engage with a brand’s SMS programs twice a week! This same study shows only 31% of consumers respond to a brand’s emails at the same rate weekly. 

If they’re not subscribed to your emails or SMS, this consolidated marketing approach can meet them where they are and expand your market reach. Reaching mobile audiences on their preferred platform helps you connect with them. It centralizes their attention, which is typically divided across multiple channels.

Stronger Multi-Channel Campaign Performance

Did you know that SMS marketing messages have a 98% open rate compared to email’s 20%? These statistics show your SMS campaigns are more likely to have a higher engagement rate and stronger performance overall among your recipients. And you can leverage this to cross-promote your emails—without creating all new content! 

You can re-purpose your email marketing content and convert it into micro SMS campaigns, such as:

• Coupons, promotional codes, and loyalty program discounts
• Back-in-stock notifications and low inventory alerts
• Holiday sales or upcoming event announcements
• Order, shipment, and delivery confirmations
• Abandon cart reminders

It’s important to note that you shouldn’t send duplicate content via SMS and email. If your customers see the same text message as your email blasts, they’re 37% more likely to unsubscribe because it’s redundant, spammy, and lacks value. 

Centralized Customer Data

Combining email and SMS marketing allows you to consolidate customer data into one platform. A centralized CRM with SMS and email customer data makes it easier for you to analyze and create more effective campaigns. 

You can update customer data profiles to show them more relevant content, such as product promotions related to their most recent purchase and order history.

It also makes segmentation more efficient because you can organize your contacts by stage in their customer journey and channel. You wouldn’t send a loyalty discount email to new customers or SMS promotional sign-ups to people already subscribed. 

Centralized SMS and email customer data promote personalization and greater efficiency, leading to more successful outreach.

Increased Customer Engagement and Lifetime Value

As mentioned above, SMS recipients typically engage more since they have a significantly higher open rate over email. But what about those who sign up for both your channels? Studies show that SMS email subscribers are 2.4 times more likely to buy than solely SMS ones. 

This history of increased customer lifetime value of recipients who engage with SMS and email is more cost-effective. Retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones and provides long-term benefits.

Keeping your current customers happy also makes them more likely to refer your business to people they know. In return, you gain a more loyal customer base and sustainable revenue sources since they’re more likely to repeat purchases because they trust your brand. 

Greater Content Marketing ROI

Utilizing email and SMS marketing can improve your campaign’s efficiency for a greater content marketing ROI. Your business is investing time and resources into these content marketing campaigns. You shouldn’t be creating content for the sake of doing it. It should support your bottom line and content marketing goals. 

This centralized approach increases your content marketing ROI with the following:

• Prevents you from sending irrelevant content, like duplicate messages, based on your customer’s interactions
• Leads to stronger campaign performance metrics, like opens, clicks, and conversions, because of your expanded market reach
• Provides more effective A/B testing to create better-performing campaigns because you know what resonates with your audience best

How to Combine SMS and Email Marketing Strategies to Boost Customer Engagement and Revenue

Now that you know the benefits of utilizing email and SMS for your marketing efforts, here’s how to combine them for optimal results. 

Send Cross-Promotional Content to Increase Subscribers

You can’t reach more customers if they aren’t subscribed to your email or SMS marketing lists. However, you can encourage more people to sign up with channel-exclusive incentives. You can increase SMS subscribers by cross-promoting it to your email contacts with rewards and offers. 

For example, you can send email blasts with special discounts for opting into your SMS marketing. This cross-promotional approach can be done vice versa if you want to build a bigger audience on your email marketing list.

Segment Your Subscribers by Channel and Engagement

The next step to developing an email SMS marketing strategy is segmenting your subscribers. Organize them by single and multi-channel subscribers so you know who to focus on for email, SMS, and both. That way, when you create email SMS campaigns, you can promote relevant content per platform. 

Create Personalized Drip Campaigns

Drip campaigns are blasts sequenced and triggered by customer interactions. They’re typically used in email marketing to contact customers with various touchpoints based on what they do, from open to purchase and unsubscribe. However, you can also utilize SMS email marketing in personalized drip campaigns.

An example of an SMS email drip campaign is:

• Welcome emails for new sign-ups
• Initial abandon cart email
• Follow-up abandon cart SMS
• Purchase confirmation email
• SMS order review request

We recommend using email and SMS marketing automation to streamline this process with data-driven metrics for you. Platforms like MailChimp and Constant Contact have built-in SMS email features that automate the sequencing of these touchpoints per customer interaction. 

That way, you tailor your content for each unique subscriber based on where they are on their customer’s journey. Some customers may be ready to buy and waiting for a promotional sale, while others are considering their options between you and your competitor. Personalization is key not to only SMS emails but also to effective marketing. 

Analyze SMS Email Campaigns for Improvement

As with any of your marketing efforts, you should always analyze your performance metrics to uncover areas of improvement. 

Key metrics to focus on in your SMS email campaigns include:

• Open, click, and engagement rate per channel
• Conversion rates for SMS
• Unsubscriber rates per channel

We recommend using automated email SMS platforms to streamline the data analytical process because they generate custom reports with recommendations per campaign. They analyze the performances of each channel and customer interactions with greater efficiency to maximize your next campaign’s performance with data-driven strategies. 

SMS and Email Marketing FAQs:

What’s the Difference Between SMS Marketing vs. Email Marketing?

The difference between SMS vs. email marketing is the channel they’re used on and content length. SMS (Short Message Service) marketing uses short-form texts and sends them to all cell phone types, including Android and Apple. 

Email marketing is obviously for emails and can be sent to any platform, like Gmail and Outlook. These are typically longer forms with scrollable content. 

What is an SMS Email?

An SMS email is a marketing text message converted from an email blast. It reformats email content into short-form texts and is sent to the subscriber’s cell phone. 

Can I Send an SMS to Email?

Yes. Sending SMS from email blasts can be done and vice-versa. 

How Do You Convert an Email to a Text Message?

Email marketing platforms convert emails to text messages via SMS gateways. An email is reformatted shorter and sent to an SMS email address linked to the subscriber’s phone number. You can find SMS emails with phone validating tools, like NumVerify, which also integrate with email marketing platforms.

Boost Your Inbox Impact with Professional Email and SMS Marketing Services

It can be challenging to strengthen your SMS email marketing efforts, with various platforms to manage, analyze, and create content for—especially on a monthly or weekly basis. 

Let us maximize your campaign’s potential. 

At Reach Marketing Pro, we’re a full-service digital agency with extensive experience in email SMS marketing. We can create and optimize your existing campaigns with custom visuals, effective messaging, and multi-channel personalization for greater ROI. 

We’ll also include monthly reports to continuously track and measure the success of your email SMS strategies and improve them for better performance. 

Ready to reach more of your customers? 

Learn more about our email marketing services, or contact us today!