SMS Open Rates: How Often Do People Open Marketing Texts?

Humans have evolved. Once, we could only communicate with those within earshot; now, we utilize satellites to call, text, and send documents to anyone in the world — or orbiting around the world, for that matter. 

Mobile broadband advancements have led to the digital and social media revolution. Texting has become the preferred method of contact for most people worldwide, and businesses must be willing to adapt to these changes in communication.

What does SMS open rate mean? 

An SMS open rate is just a statistic representing how often someone who receives a marketing text message opens the text on their device. Open rates, though different from response rates, are a tried and true method of measuring and gauging any marketing campaign‘s effectiveness. 

While it is much easier to gauge the success of these campaigns with digital marketing, open rate measuring goes back decades in other marketing channels, such as mail and newspaper marketing.

Why your SMS open rate matters 

Have you ever seen a printed ad that says, “Don’t forget to tell us how you heard about us?” This simple request is an archaic form of open rate measurement. By finding out how a customer heard about them, a business can measure its marketing strategy or campaign’s success. 

Luckily, with TextSanity, these measurements are much more efficient and easier to gain because our digital tools can consume and present that data to you. Knowing what is and isn’t working is vital for your bottom line. 

If a particular SMS marketing strategy is not working, you need to know to reallocate those funds to something that does. Therefore, knowing your open rate in any format is imperative to represent your cost-benefit analysis accurately.

How to increase your SMS open rate 

While the first step in effective mobile marketing strategies is knowing your actual open rate, the next step is understanding how to use that data to increase it. The answer may come in changing your method of marketing, or it may come in changing your data collection parameters or your cadence.

The most notable change you can make in increasing your open rate is ensuring you are using the most efficient marketing tools, such as SMS text marketing with TextSanity. If you are using older forms of marketing, such as mass mailers or email marketing, you are not experiencing an open rate comparable to that of SMS marketing campaigns. 

We know this because there is no other marketing strategy available to you that offers open rates as high as those found across the board with SMS texting. In the smartphone age, connecting to mobile devices in real-time is crucial for customer engagement.

What are the stats on SMS open rates? 

Let’s first start with a different stat to understand why the open rates for SMS texts are so high compared to others. Research has found that over 85% of respondents prefer texting over other forms of communication, including email. Moreover, over 90% of people will open a text within three minutes of receiving it. Compare that to nearly 55% of people who receive emails, never opening them and choosing just to delete them instead. You can see clearly how big of an advantage SMS text marketing has over email marketing campaigns. 

We’ve been saving these big numbers for last, and honestly, if you are not sitting down, you probably should because the gap between open rates for texting and emails is more significant than the Grand Canyon.

SMS text marketing has an open rate of over 98% compared to an open rate of just 20% with emails. Yeah, we know, that’s an astounding spread, and once we pay very close attention to it, we hope that now you will also. If you have a set amount of money set aside for digital marketing and you are not capitalizing on this open rate statistic, it may be time to reanalyze how you are spending your valuable marketing dollars. 

How often do people open marketing texts? 

With an average open rate of 98%, you can expect that nearly 98 out of every 100 SMS messages sent to your customers will be opened, compared to just 20 out of every 100 emails. If you were to break down the cost-benefit of what you pay per 20 opens in emails versus per 98 opens with TextSanity, it would be difficult to choose the former over the latter.

Ask any experienced salesperson, and they will tell you that sales are a numbers game. There’s an adage in sales that if you don’t hear the word no, you also don’t hear the word yes. If you are hearing a lot of no’s, in other words, you are also hearing a lot of yes’s. 

While every customer that opens a text message won’t necessarily engage with it, you will have far more touch points than email, which, based on the numbers game rule, means you will have far more engagements than emails. 

What are the SMS open rates vs. engagement rates? 

Just because your leads and customers are opening their text messages doesn’t necessarily mean that they are engaging with them. Again, sales is a numbers game, and the more touch points you can have with a customer, the more chances for engagement you will have. In other words, the more people that open your text messages, the more engagements you will encounter. It’s the law of numbers.

According to research done by LearnHub, 33% of consumers who receive SMS messages engage with them, and 47% end up making a purchase. Another way to put those statistics into numbers is to say that about 15-17 people out of every 100 you text will end up doing business with you due to your SMS text marketing campaign. That’s about 200% more engagement and sales than you would receive from email or social media marketing — a much higher conversion rate.

How to use SMS marketing to reach new customers 

We think you’re probably convinced that SMS texting is a marketing strategy your business should implement soon. TextSanity offers various marketing tools to engage with your customers through SMS texting, including automation tools that allow you to establish a cadence or rhythm to your campaigns. 

The first step after signing up for your TextSanity account is to meet with your team and determine your objectives and vision for your company’s marketing efforts. Once you have completed this critical step and developed your strategy, the logistics of starting your campaigns are simple. Our easy-to-use platforms make creating your SMS text marketing simple and easy. In other words, no experience required.  

How to automate your SMS marketing 

Technology is advancing at a pace that is difficult to keep up with, and automation is increasingly becoming a cornerstone of that advancement. The key to remember about automation, however, is that automation cannot ever replace human creativity and intelligence.

Automating your text marketing has never been easier with TextSanity. We offer you and your marketing team several options to efficiently engage with your customers and increase your lead conversions.

Text bots, for example, are similar to chatbots that you have most likely encountered on multiple websites you have visited. Text bots utilize keyword campaigns to create engagement between your business and its customers. 

Keyword message campaigns work together to establish connections and influence customers to opt-in to receiving future messages, which opens the door for your marketing team to begin drip campaigns to keep your customers engaged with your business. 

For instance, you may use a single message campaign to ask customers if they want to receive updates on their order through SMS texting. Once they opt-in, you then give status updates on their order. A few days after the order is completed, you follow up on their satisfaction, ask for a review, or offer a discount on a future purchase. This cadence establishes a connection unlike any other you can find. 

Keyword campaigns experience highly effective engagement rates, with at least 45% of consumers contacted through SMS texting completing the requested action. Using automation and templates, you can kickstart your keyword campaigns and experience high-yielding results. Here’s an example of what creating a template on TextSanity looks like:

1. Login to your TextSanity account
2. Locate the “More Tools” tab at the top of the webpage
3. Search and select “Templates” from the list
4. Click on the “+New Template” option
5. Give your template a name
6. Insert your message in the “Message” section
7. Click the “Save” button
8. Send or Schedule the Text Message to be sent using your new template

It’s genuinely that easy!

How to increase your SMS open rate and engagement rate 

You can implement countless methods to encourage increased open and engagement rates with your SMS marketing. Some ways to encourage your target audience to open their text messages include: 

• offering rewards for checking in through text when consumers visit
• offering coupons and discounts for opting in to SMS text marketing messages
• providing resources like PDF menus through text 

These strategies, among others, provide valuable customer data for future campaigns tailored to categories of customers defined by your business’s sales and marketing goals. 

What to do next 

It might sound cheesy, but your next step is to send us a text! Yes, like your consumers, we also like texting. Honestly, it might look bad if an SMS text marketing provider didn’t have texting as a contact method, so hopefully, you saw that coming!

All jokes aside, if you would like to discuss your options further and ask the difficult but necessary questions, contact us by texting us, calling us, or engaging with our website’s chatbot. We are excited that you are considering starting this new marketing adventure and even more excited to be your partner through the journey.