Email vs. SMS promotions for e-commerce

When it comes to promoting your e-commerce business and reaching more customers, which type of marketing is better – email or SMS?

Statistics show that, compared to emails, text messages have a stellar open and click-through rate. The average open rate for emails is approximately 20%, while the average open rate for text messages is close to 99%.... Email promotions have an average click-through rate (CTR) of 6%, while text messages have an average CTR of 36%.

These numbers show that SMS beats out emails by a wide margin. As an e-commerce business owner, how can you leverage SMS promotions to connect with your customers and boost sales?

Email promotions aren’t very effective

If you’re still collecting only email addresses from online visitors to your e-commerce store, you’re missing out. Gmail and similar providers have become really good at marking promotional emails as spam, which means most of your customers will never even get to see your discounts and deals.

Instead, if you start collecting your site visitors’ phone numbers you position your business to tap into WhatsApp and SMS promotion opportunities.

Why don't you start requesting phone numbers instead of or in addition to emails with your “10% off the first purchase” website pop-up?

Even if only a fifth of visitors who decide to share their contact info with you leaves a phone number instead of an email address, you’ll come out ahead, as our next section illustrates.

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How SMS promotions can boost your sales

We’ll walk you through an exercise that shows why SMS promotions can truly help you engage with your contacts and convert their interest into a sale.

Let’s assume your website or online store gets 500 visitors today, and half (250) decide to leave their contact information to take advantage of the 10% off deal they see in your pop-up.

Let's be pessimistic, and assume that of those who take action, only one fifth leave their phone number instead of their email... This means that of the 250 visitors who leave you some sort of contact information, you'll have 200 email addresses and 50 phone numbers in your hands.

A week later, you decide to launch a marketing campaign to promote top-selling items.

Using the statistics we shared earlier, here’s what will likely happen.

Email promotion

• If you send 200 emails, only 40 will be opened (20% average open rate of marketing emails)
• Of those 40, only 2 or 3 people will click through (6% average CTR of marketing emails)
• If your average cart size is £100 and all 3 people make that purchase, your sales will be £300

SMS promotion

• If you send 50 SMS, 49 people will open your text message (99% average open rate of text messages)
• Of those 49, about 17 or 18 people will click through (36% average CTR of text messages)
• If your average cart size is £100 and all 18 people make that purchase, your sales will be £1,800
  
  

As you can see, 50 phone numbers can generate six times more sales than 200 emails!

If you’d like to learn more about how Fuzey can help you scale your e-commerce business through messaging, reach out today and book a demo filling the form below!