Brands are increasingly building out their SMS and mobile push messaging audiences to supplement their well-established email marketing programs. However, as these audiences grow, it becomes more important to have a clear digital channel strategy that leverages each channel optimally.

Devising an effective cross-channel messaging strategy starts by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each of these three channels. Let’s start with…

Email Marketing

This is the most established of the three channels, but that doesn’t mean it’s a staid channel. Email marketing continues to evolve as tech capabilities grow, inbox providers introduce changes, and privacy constraints increase. 

Strengths

  1. Email marketing list sizes are far larger than SMS and push audiences, because the channel is so established and because most consumers prefer to communicate with brands via email marketing over other channels.
  2. Because it is less interruptive than SMS and push, consumers tolerate much higher message frequencies for email.
  3. Email supports rich content, including many fonts, detailed styling and layouts, images, and even interactivity. It allows for long messages with many calls-to-action.
  4. All stages of an email interaction are measurable, including direct attribution of conversions.
  5. Email marketing is appropriate for a wide range of messages, including promotional, loyalty, transactional, and automated campaigns.

Weaknesses

  1. Delivery of your email campaigns is not guaranteed, as inbox providers block senders for a variety of reasons, including generating overly high bounce rates or spam complaint rates, having low engagement rates, and appearing on email blocklists.
  2. Email is the least urgent of the three channels, so engagement rates tend to be much lower compared to SMS and push.
  3. A lack of coding and support standards across inbox providers means that emails often render differently depending on the email client used to read them.
  4. Apple’s launch of Mail Privacy Protection in 2021 has reduced visibility into email open rates by creating auto opens that obscure subscriber engagement. Apple’s Link Tracking Protection has also undermined conversion tracking for some senders.

SMS Marketing

This is the middle child in terms of maturity. The channel is a favorite for transactional messages, especially urgent ones. However, brands have opportunities to judiciously use SMS for promotional messages, too. 

Strengths

  1. SMS is interruptive, making it ideal for urgent communications, alerts, and transactional messages, such as order confirmations, delivery confirmations, security and fraud alerts, curbside and BOPIS notifications, and the impending arrival of service reps on site.
  2. Because SMS messages demand attention, response rates tend to be strong.
  3. The risk of your SMS campaigns being blocked by carriers is very low, as the channel’s spam reporting and spam filtering capabilities are nascent compared to email. It was only earlier this decade that Apple Message enabled users to report texts as spam.
  4. The ability to send video messages (MMS) can create unique subscriber experiences.

Weaknesses

  1. Because it’s the most personal and interruptive of the three channels, SMS opt-in rates tend to be low and SMS audiences small compared to email.
  2. For the same reason, brands must carefully manage the frequency and time-of-day timing of their messages to avoid annoying subscribers. In general, SMS campaign frequencies are much, much lower than email—particularly for promotional messages.
  3. Because many carriers used to charge users for texting (in some cases per text), SMS has a legacy of being quite regulated. State laws regarding commercial texts can be hazy, and they often require brands to use double opt-in, which reduces list growth.
  4. Message design is severely limited.
  5. You should avoid using redirects in your text-message links, as carriers may block messages if a shortened link uses too many redirects before resolving at the intended page.
  6. It’s generally more expensive to send SMS messages than emails. And it’s considerably more expensive to send MMS messages.

Mobile Push Marketing

This is the youngest of the three channels, emerging alongside the growth of mobile apps during the smartphone boom of the late oughts and early 2010s. Consumer use of and behaviors toward push are similar to SMS.

Strengths

  1. Like SMS, push messages are interruptive, drawing subscribers’ attention. Unlike SMS and email, however, push messages disappear after they’re tapped, creating the highest sense of urgency. It’s use it or lose it.
  2. The delivery of mobile push messages aren’t mediated by carriers or other providers. If a user has opted in, the deliverability is always 100%, a stark difference from SMS and, in particular, email.
  3. Brands control the sending of push messages for their app, giving them greater flexibility for sending last-minute messages.

Weaknesses

  1. Like SMS, opt-in rates are very low compared to email.
  2. Also like SMS, brands need to be careful about messaging too frequently and the timing of their messages, paying attention to the recipient’s time zone to avoid overly early or late sends.
  3. Senders have to enable attribution, which is often limited only to purchases made in your app.
  4. Design options for messages are limited.
  5. It’s possible for consumers to opt-in to push messages across multiple devices, resulting in the same message appearing on each of those devices, which could undermine one-to-one messaging goals. Thankfully, this is quite rare.

Omnichannel Marketing Mix

Once you appreciate all of those channel differences, you can start to formulate a strategy that spans all of them. As you do that, consider the following:

Email marketing subscribers are likely to always be your largest audience. And mobile push is likely to be your long-term No. 2, since it has fewer rules and regulations than SMS. 

We recommend reviewing your current push marketing opt-in appeal, process, and welcome. Is the value proposition to sign up clear and compelling? Is the process simple? Does the welcome set expectations and start to deliver value? Also consider adjusting your appeal and welcome during key selling seasons, like the holiday season for retailers, so you’re grounding your messaging in the moment. While you’re at it, review these elements for your email and SMS programs, too.

Customers are significantly more valuable if they opt into more marketing channels, because they tend to be more engaged and loyal. To encourage this, you need to cross-promote your channels. However, to make those promotions effective, you need to offer a significantly different experience in each channel.

Beyond respecting different frequency tolerances across channels, you should send some exclusive messaging and offers. For example, perhaps you only do flash sales via SMS and push, playing to the urgency of those channels. You might also do in-app specials via push, and curbside and BOPIS specials via SMS, since those channels align with those activities. And you might limit some video content to your SMS (MMS) subscribers.

Of course, some overlap is fine, since the majority of your customers will only be opted into one of these channels. However, the more overlap there is in your messaging across channels, then the more likely a subscriber is to only pick one, undercutting the boost brands get from cultivating omnichannel customers.

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