Untapped Potential

the most powerful untapped marketing channel you’re probably not using

The smartphone is the fastest-growing human-made technology phenomenon - ever. The number of mobile devices now exceed the world’s population. Put simply, there are now more phones on the planet than people.

Over 80% of the world’s population owns a smartphone, with the UK top of the world smartphone penetration league with 83%. And the British love their phones. We check them every 12 minutes and spend an average of 3 hours 25 mins per day on them. Sheesh.

We use our phones to watch movies, check email, search the web, find dates, and chat with friends. So no wonder that marketers treat the smartphone as the place to reach customers.

But there’s one mobile marketing channel that has been overlooked. Whereas social media and email have been overrun with marketing messages, your SMS inbox remains relatively untouched. The irony being that, compared to the other marketing channels, people are incredibly responsive when they receive an SMS. 

SMS’s have an open rate of 98% compared to 15% to 25% open rate for email - with more than 60% of recipients reading them within five minutes. It also takes an average of just 90 seconds for a recipient to respond to an SMS, while it takes 90 minutes on average to get a response to an email. 

It’s no secret that email marketing statistics are on the slide. After all, email inboxes are incredibly busy places nowadays. In 2020, there were 4.3 billion email users. (An increase from 3.7 billion in 2017.) With 269 billion emails being sent per day, it’s no wonder our inboxes are becoming increasingly cluttered. In addition to sheer volume, over 50% of emails are unsolicited. As such, most get deleted without being read. The rest are automatically removed by spam filters and don’t even get seen.  

In contrast, our SMS inboxes have become less busy. Since 2010 there has been a steady decline in the number of text messages sent.

So it stands to reason that SMS is touted as the biggest untapped marketing channel available to brands today.

Yet, very few businesses take full advantage of SMS. In fact, only 39% of businesses use SMS marketing. (We’re surprised it’s that high.)

Sure, some businesses use SMS. Like the delivery firms who ping you a text to tell you when you can expect the driver to arrive. Or your dentist when she sends an appointment reminder. But these transactional text messages are about as exciting as it gets. 

According to SlickText, 50% of people would consider taking action if they receive a text; with over 60% indicating they would actually prefer to communication via SMS. 45% said they would respond to branded messages.

A 2021 SMS marketing report found “96% of marketers using text messaging say it has helped them drive more revenue – and almost 60% say it’s significantly or overwhelmingly increased revenue generation.” Coca-Cola spends 70% of its mobile marketing budget on SMS services, and they know a thing or two about marketing. Plus, digital marketing magazine found that 75% of people would be happy to receive offers by SMS. 

So why is this marketing channel astonishingly so under-utilised? What’s stopping you from utilising SMS marketing? Here’s the four main culprits…

Mistrust

People are wary of clicking on any link they’re not sure of - either in an email or an SMS. But in terms of engagement, SMS wins hands down. With SMS click through rates of 36%, compared to email click-through rates just above 3%. A disparity of 1200%

permission

It is illegal for anyone to send you texts unless you have previously given them permission. But so few companies actively seek permission. It seems their sole focus is to build their email marketing list, meaning the real gold is left un-mined. SizzleDeck is designed for the purpose of gathering phone numbers and gaining the right permission.

Character limits

Text messages require the sender to be snappy in their messaging. This is a good thing. (Especially now humans have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. How do they work that out?) Nevertheless, email allows you to waffle on until you lose someone’s interest, but SMS is short and snappy - which forces you to make every. Single. Word. Count.

Loyalty

Maybe you don’t want to move away from your other marketing channels and replace them with SMS marketing? Then don’t. Using both email and SMS in conjunction can increase your email open rate by as much as 20%-30%.

Get a free demo of SizzleDeck today and start harnessing the power of SMS for your business.