SMS Marketing Statistics

90% of SMS Marketing Messages Read in 3 Minutes

Conversational Advertising Report from MobileSquared - 90% of SMS Marketing Messages Read in 3 Minutes
One of the major benefits of SMS marketing, besides 99% SMS open rates, is how fast customers open SMS marketing messages. How fast are SMS marketing messages opened? According to a report from MobileSquared entitled Conversational Advertising, 90% of SMS marketing messages are opened within 3 minutes. What’s even crazier is that 99% of SMS marketing messages are opened within 20 minutes.

 

What is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels to reach your customers because while emails can sit unopened in an inbox for hours — or worse, sent directly to the trash folder — as we said above, 90% of SMS marketing messages are opened within the first 3 minutes. In addition to that, 78% of consumers say that SMS marketing is the fastest way to reach them. That makes SMS marketing a perfect channel for marketers who have a time-sensitive promotion or alert to share.

Want to see examples from top brands such as Auto Zone, Express, Papa John’s, Round Table Pizza and many more, check out SMS Archives – A Search Engine for SMS Marketing.

 

SMS Marketing vs Email Marketing

Unfortunately there’s not much data about how fast emails are opened, and the data we did find is based on hours, not minutes like SMS marketing. For example, we found one source that said about 10% of email recipients opened within the first hour after the send, and 90% of the total opens happening only after 80 hours. Yes, you read that correctly… 80 hours! To put that in context, by the time 90% of your customers have seen your SMS message, less than 1% of your customers have seen your email. By the time your SMS message has been opened by 100% of your customers, only 3% of your customers have opened your email.

 

Conversational Advertising Report

Below you’ll find the pages from the report that talk about SMS open rates.

If you want to view the full report, click here.

Conversational Advertising Report by MobileSquared - Page 8 and 9

As you can see in the chart below, 90% of all incoming SMS are read within 3 minutes.

Conversational Advertising Report by MobileSquared Chart - 90% of SMS Marketing Messages Read in 3 Minutes

Why are people so quick to open SMS messages? The following chart from the report explains. When you look at all the devices you have, and the media you consume, there’s nothing that is closer to your customers than their mobile phones. This is why 90% of SMS marketing messages are opened within 3 minutes, because their mobile phones are always close by.

Conversational Advertising Report by MobileSquared Chart - SMS Marketing Effectiveness

The next page of the report shows how the speed of SMS opens impacts an SMS marketing campaign.

Conversational Advertising Report by MobileSquared - Page 10 and 11

As you can see in the chart below, if you have 1 million SMS subscribers, you can expect 900,000 of them to open the SMS message within 3 minutes.

Conversational Advertising Report by MobileSquared Chart - SMS Marketing Immediacy Chart

 

Other SMS Marketing Statistics

Looking for more SMS marketing statistics? Check out some of our favorites below.


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