SMS, Apps or Email? Customer Engagement Strategies Analysed[Infographic]

Customer engagement can be a rather difficult nut to crack. You can put hundreds of hours of thought into a marketing strategy and its execution, but it is impossible to judge for certain whether or not it will be a success. We can try to second guess the mindset of our target market, but we are not mind readers.

That said, there are ways of enhancing the likelihood of your marketing campaign being a profitable success or an expensive failure. A big part of that, if not the biggest, is identifying the means through which the campaign is to be conducted. Do you stick to the time-honoured email route, go modern with apps or take the more direct SMS approach?

Market research shows that SMS tends to be by far the most successful option of the three. A text message is almost certainly going to be read, but only 1 in 5 promotional emails ever get opened. The click-through rates are similarly emphatic – 19% for SMS compared to a meagre 2% for email. When we receive a text message, we will usually read it immediately and, in all likelihood, act upon it with immediacy. With email, on the other hand, we often decide to check it later or to ignore it completely. SMS is also far easier to customise so that it looks directed to a specific customer; promotional emails, no matter how hard you try, are usually perceived as total spam.

The people at Neon SMS created the infographic below which compares between SMS, apps and email as methods of customer engagement. While the statistics lean heavily in favour of SMS, it is not universally the best solution. Think about who your audience is and what message you are trying to convey. Then you can make an executive decision as to how the campaign will be distributed. That decision could make or break the entire campaign.