SMS and Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Boost Customer Engagement

Some things just work better together — peanut butter and jelly, salt and pepper, and SMS and email marketing. 

While both of these marketing channels can be highly effective individually, they’re even more impactful when used within an integrated marketing campaign. Multi-channel marketing strategies like these help you expand your reach, improve customer engagement, and gather data to refine your approach. According to recent reports, following up your promotional emails with an SMS message can increase open rates between 20 and 30%.

Instead of your promotional texts and emails competing for your subscribers’ attention, they work together to make a stronger impression. Your integrated SMS and email marketing campaigns will help drive higher engagement, boost conversions, and create a more unified customer experience. 

Launching these campaigns isn’t as tricky as it sounds, either. Discover the key first steps and strategies in this guide. 

What is SMS and email marketing?

SMS and email marketing are both versatile, accessible marketing channels that any brand can use to drive results. They also happen to work very well together, so it’s worth considering integrated email and SMS campaigns. 

Understanding SMS marketing

SMS marketing consists of brands sending promotional text messages to their subscribers’ phone numbers. These messages are text-only and limited to no more than 160 characters, so you have to keep them short and sweet. 

You can use promotional texts in many different ways, including:

• Sharing special offers
• Sending abandoned cart reminders
• Notifying customers that a product is back in stock
• Reminding customers about an upcoming event
• Sharing order updates
• Collecting feedback through surveys
• Sending appointment reminders

The flexibility and immediacy of SMS marketing make it an appealing option for brands across industries. Considering the 98% open rate of SMS, it’s no surprise that the market for this channel is growing quickly and is projected to reach $12.6 billion by the end of 2025.

Understanding email marketing

In an email marketing strategy, brands send email messages to promote their products and services, keeping customers engaged and informed. It’s a very versatile marketing channel, allowing you to send newsletters, promotional emails about deals and discounts, event announcements, and even abandoned cart reminders.

Many people underestimate email marketing, but it actually offers an incredible return on investment — $36 per dollar spent, on average. 

Your email marketing campaigns help you drive traffic to your website and strengthen your relationship with your customers. Well-designed marketing emails keep customers engaged and improve your overall brand awareness. 

SMS vs. email marketing: Which is better?

When you’re considering two different marketing channels, it’s natural to wonder which will offer better results for your brand. Really, though, it’s impossible to say whether email marketing or SMS marketing is better, because it all depends on your goals and preferences. Compare these key features of email and SMS marketing for a better idea of which channel is best for your brand. 

Key similarities between SMS and email marketing

In both SMS and email marketing, you need to get the recipients’ permission before you can send messages to them. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the U.S. requires businesses to get clear consent before sending promotional texts, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the E.U. sets the same requirement for promotional emails. The CAN-SPAM Act also requires companies sending marketing emails to include an easy way for recipients to opt out of future messages. 

Getting your audience to opt in to your messages isn’t just about legal compliance, though. By only sending to customers who have already shown some interest in your brand and agreed to receive marketing messages from you, your audience is much more likely to be engaged. Your SMS and email campaigns will generate better results with prior opt-ins.

SMS and email marketing both offer easily measurable engagement metrics, which makes it much more convenient to determine whether your campaigns are performing well and what you can improve. These metrics include the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. 

You can also try segmenting your audience and personalizing your messages with both SMS and email marketing campaigns. Personalizing the messages makes them more relevant to the recipients, potentially boosting your engagement and return on investment. 

Critical differences between SMS and email marketing

There are some significant differences between these two marketing channels, though. For one thing, emails can be much longer and contain a greater variety of content than text messages. You can add videos, GIFs, countdowns, and even forms to emails — that’s not possible with texts.

On the flip side, SMS marketing offers something email marketing doesn’t: immediacy. A promotional text creates a phone alert just like any other text message, so many recipients will read the message right away. That’s likely part of the reason SMS campaigns have that 98% open rate. By comparison, email marketing achieves an average open rate of 26.8%. 

Both SMS and email marketing are relatively inexpensive compared to traditional marketing channels and offer strong returns on investment. As mentioned, brands see an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent on email marketing and $21 to $40 for every dollar spent on SMS marketing. 

Try SMS marketing for time-sensitive messages like flash sales or appointment reminders. Email marketing campaigns are better for more detailed content and nurturing relationships with your subscribers. 

Why SMS marketing is still effective in 2025

With so many new marketing trends like short-form video and influencer marketing, you may be wondering whether SMS marketing is a bit outdated now. Text message marketing has been around a while, but it’s still as effective as ever. Today’s software advancements have made it even easier to drive great results for your business using text messages. 

SMS marketing performance statistics

The average American checks their phone over 200 times per day, creating tons of opportunities for you to get your marketing messages in front of them with SMS campaigns. Americans also average more than five hours per day on their phones. With the right SMS strategy, you can ensure customers spend some of that screen time reading and interacting with your text messages. 

Customers open 98% of promotional texts and engage with many of them, too. The average SMS campaign has a click-through rate of 6%. If you consider that email marketing across industries averages a 1.36% click-through rate, it’s clear how well SMS marketing campaigns perform. Your SMS campaign results will depend on several factors, including the promotional texts themselves and your industry or niche. 

Evolution of SMS marketing

Text messages aren’t new, and neither is SMS marketing. However, SMS marketing today has come a long way from the promotional texts of the past. 

Now, brands often combine SMS marketing with other channels for integrated marketing campaigns. A coordinated approach makes marketing messages more impactful and often yields better results than using a single channel alone. 

New technology has also changed SMS marketing. Today, brands can leverage tools to help them track text message opt-ins, segment their subscribers, and set up automatic text message sequences.

In recent years, consumers and officials have placed greater emphasis on privacy. Brands using SMS marketing have had to adapt by getting consent before sending promotional texts and offering an easy way to opt out of these messages later. You can’t simply text a list of random phone numbers about your new product or service — that would be spam and probably wouldn’t generate great results, anyway. 

Benefits of combining email and SMS marketing

If you’re running SMS or email marketing campaigns, it’s worth integrating them into one combined approach. After all, who doesn’t want better segmentation and higher conversion rates?

Create a unified customer experience

Customers like consistency and knowing what to expect from your brand. Using integrated email and SMS campaigns makes it easier to maintain consistent brand messaging across channels, so you’ll see better results. 

With cross-compatible data from both channels, you can also enhance your customer journey mapping. You’ll know how customers interact with your brand and which marketing messages are most impactful. 

Improved targeting and segmentation

If you combine the data from both channels, your customer profiles will also be more complete. You’ll have more details to use for segmentation and targeting. For example, you could focus on highly engaged SMS and email subscribers who haven’t made a purchase yet and send them a text with an exclusive discount. You can further enhance your efforts with A/B testing across channels. What works for email subscribers may work for text subscribers, too.

Driving higher engagement and conversion rates

At different stages in the customer journey, a customer might respond better to an email or a text. Your integrated campaigns can use complementary timing strategies so you’re always sending the right message at the right time through the ideal channel.

If a message is particularly important, reinforce it by covering the topic in both an email and a text message. This coordination between the two marketing channels will engage your subscribers and encourage them to take action. 

7 effective SMS marketing strategies

Anyone can execute a successful SMS marketing campaign with the right tactics in their toolkit! Keep these seven key strategies in mind while designing your next campaign.

Strategy 1: Time your SMS messages perfectly

Ideally, you want to send your messages when your subscribers are most likely to read and engage with them. That time will depend on your target audience. For example, the best time to send B2B messages might be during business hours when your clients are engaged. If you’re trying to connect with college students, you might be better off sending messages in the evening when they’re probably out of class with their phones on. 

Sending promotional texts too frequently may overwhelm and frustrate your subscribers, so try to space out your messages. One to two messages per week is often a good frequency to keep your subscribers engaged without bombarding them.

Strategy 2: Craft compelling SMS content

It’s easy to focus so much on details like timing and list management that you forget the most important part of SMS marketing: the actual content of your message!

Marketing texts need to create a sense of urgency and offer value to make a lasting impact on your subscribers. For example, a common use case for SMS marketing is telling customers about an upcoming limited promotion. Since the deal expires soon, customers have a reason to act right away. 

Your content needs to fit within the 160-character limit, so you only have room for one or two sentences. Make them count. Try short but effective calls-to-action like:

• Shop now
• Get early access
• Grab your faves
• Don’t miss out
• Claim your cart
• Redeem today

Strategy 3: SMS automation and triggered messages

Automatic SMS triggered messages are a convenient way to engage your subscribers with highly relevant content. Experiment with different triggers, like: 

• Event-based SMS triggers: Messages that go out on the customer’s birthday, an anniversary, or a holiday, for example.
• Behavior-triggered messages: Messages triggered by customers visiting your website, adding items to their cart, making a purchase, or taking some other specified action.
• Location-based SMS opportunities: Messages for customers in specific locations, like near one of your physical stores.

Set up automatic messages within your SMS marketing platform. That way, the messages will go out when the specified condition (action, event, location) is met — you don’t need to lift a finger. 

Strategy 4: SMS list building and maintenance

Before you can launch any SMS marketing campaigns, you need a list of subscribers to send your messages to. Try these methods to build your subscriber list:

• Enabling text-to-join: Interested customers can send a text to a unique phone number you set up to quickly and easily subscribe to marketing text messages from your brand.
• Offering incentives for opt-ins: Encourage SMS sign-ups with incentives like exclusive deals, early access to products, or free downloads. 
• Adding an SMS sign-up form to your websites and emails: Ask customers to join your text list in high-visibility areas, like the top of your website or email messages.

You also need to regularly clean your SMS list, just like your email list. After trying to re-engage them, remove any subscribers who haven’t interacted with your texts in recent months. Cleaning up your list will help boost your campaign metrics and reduce spam complaints against your brand. 

Strategy 5: Personalization in SMS marketing

A personalized message is tailored to the recipient’s interests, behavior, or demographics, making it much more likely to engage them than a generic message. 

Use customer data to personalize some of your promotional messages, but remember to strike a balance between personalization and privacy. Only use data that customers willingly provided, such as their purchase history or contact information. 

Strategy 6: Integrate SMS with other marketing channels

SMS and email marketing go especially well together, but you can also integrate SMS with other channels. For example, you can cross-promote your SMS list on your social media or vice versa. 

Just make sure your messaging is cohesive across all the marketing channels you use. And implement multi-channel attribution to accurately measure the impact each channel has on your engagement and conversions. 

Strategy 7: SMS analytics and optimization

Tracking and analyzing key metrics is the best way to optimize your campaigns going forward. With SMS campaigns, focus on metrics like:

• Delivery rate
• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Return on investment (ROI)

This data will help you understand what’s working well with your campaigns and how you can improve. Focus on continual improvement, even if it’s just slight increases from one campaign to the next. Repeatedly refining your campaigns will make a big difference before you know it. 

Getting started with SMS and email marketing

As with any new endeavor, taking a leap of faith is the hardest part of launching email and SMS campaigns. Just focus on these key initial steps first, and great results will follow.

Select the right platform

Using the right marketing platform will make all the difference in your SMS and email marketing campaigns. Look for an SMS platform that allows you to create integrated campaigns with features like:

• Scalability: Choose a tool with the ability to accommodate higher message volume as your email and SMS lists grow.
• Integration with other tools: Make sure the tool you select can integrate with other tools you already use, like your CRM, for smoother implementation. 
• Budget-friendliness: Marketing tools vary widely in price, so select one that fits within your budget and offers a strong return on investment for the fees you’re paying. 
• User-friendliness: The best marketing tools offer comprehensive, useful features without being overly complicated. Try to find a platform that your team can use effectively without extensive training. 

Building your contact lists

Build your SMS and email contact lists by asking customers to opt in to your messages. Try a double opt-in system to confirm each new subscriber, so you’re only sending to people who genuinely want to hear from you.  

Once you have your lists, you can segment your subscribers based on factors like purchase history, demographics, and interests. Segmenting your list will help you create more targeted, impactful messages. 

Maintain a contact database that keeps a record of each subscriber, their contact information, and how they joined your list. Remember to regularly clean your lists, updating contact information as necessary and removing any duplicates or inactive subscribers. Proper contact data management is key both for legal compliance and helping your campaigns succeed.

Creating your first SMS marketing campaign

Once you have your SMS list, you can start building your campaign. Plan some initial messages, like a sale announcement or new product promotion. Create a schedule for when you’ll send your texts.

Remember that, by law, your messages must include a way for subscribers to easily opt out of future communications. The opt-out method can be as simple as replying STOP.

Write your messages, add the opt-out feature, and test before full deployment. You may be able to preview your messages in your SMS marketing platform or send the messages out to a sample group to make sure everything’s working properly. If so, launch the campaign by sending your messages to your full subscriber list. Monitor your results as subscribers interact with your texts. 

Developing effective email templates

You don’t have to start from scratch every time you send a marketing email. That would simply be inefficient. Instead, develop email templates that you can quickly adapt for new messages. 

In each template, use the same brand colors, fonts, and other styling elements to enhance brand recognition. Keep the main content clear and concise so readers can scan. Each email should have a CTA that tells readers what to do next, typically as a button.

Make sure your templates are mobile-responsive, with plenty of white space and prominent buttons that are easy to tap. Before sending, test your messages on several devices and email service providers to check that everything looks right. You may also want to A/B test your messages to fine-tune your wording and design. 

Setting up essential automated campaigns

Automated campaigns save you time and effort while still keeping your subscribers engaged. When a customer takes a specified action, like becoming a subscriber or making a purchase, you can send them a pre-planned sequence of messages related to that action. 

The messages are timely and relevant because they’re based on what the customer is doing right now. Common examples of automated campaigns include:

• Welcome sequences: New subscribers receive a series of messages that introduce them to the brand, set expectations, and foster the relationship. 
• Abandoned cart recovery: Customers who have added products to their cart but not completed the purchase get a message prompting them to check out. 
• Re-engagement campaigns: Subscribers who haven’t engaged with messages lately get personalized messages encouraging them to take action, often with a special offer or deal as an incentive.

Common challenges and solutions

Every marketing effort comes with some challenges. The key to overcoming them is preparing for common issues and being ready to adapt as you go. If something comes up that you’re not sure how to handle, check out the Be A Marketer Podcast for advice and insights from industry experts. 

Managing frequency across channels

With integrated marketing campaigns, you need to be careful about your message frequency. Too many messages will wear out your subscribers and make them consider unsubscribing. On the other hand, sending too few messages will make it more difficult to engage your customers and hurt your return on investment. 

Start with a couple of messages per channel each week and adjust the frequency based on customer feedback. Take into account each customer’s channel preferences. Some customers might prefer mostly email messages, while others respond better to texts, so consider asking them and segmenting your lists accordingly. 

Monitor your unsubscribe rates in both channels. If you see a sudden increase in customers unsubscribing, that’s a sign to dig deeper and find out what you can do to keep more of your subscribers. 

Maintaining deliverability

Deliverability is a measure of how many of your messages reach the intended recipient rather than getting caught in spam filters or other blockages. 

To maintain high email deliverability, focus on keeping up a strong sender reputation and writing high-quality emails. Consider using email authentication to reduce the likelihood of your messages being marked as spam. 

The same principles largely apply to SMS deliverability, too. Avoid spammy language like “100% free” or “cash bonus.” Keep your content relevant and useful so users don’t report it as spam, and personalize messages when applicable. 

Measuring cross-channel success

When you run integrated email and SMS campaigns, it can sometimes be tricky to attribute results to specific messages or even channels. Try using marketing tools with multi-channel attribution for deeper insights into how customers interact with your marketing messages across channels. 

Multi-channel attribution can make it easier to calculate ROI for integrated campaigns because you’ll know which touchpoints influenced the conversions. Analyze campaign data for each channel individually and as part of a bigger, unified picture. You can determine how well email and SMS are working together and which is performing better. From there, refine your approach in one channel or both for better results. 

Maximize your potential with SMS and email marketing

Together, SMS and email marketing are more than the sum of their parts. Integrating your campaigns will help you improve engagement, drive higher conversions, and unlock deeper customer insights. 

Start by selecting a marketing platform that supports integrated email and SMS, like Constant Contact. With Constant Contact, you can set up, test, and track SMS campaigns that connect with your marketing emails. Try our SMS marketing software today!

Not sure if text message marketing is the right next move? Take our “What’s Your Next Marketing Move?” quiz to determine the next best move for your business.