SMS Open Rates vs SMS Read Rates
Many SMS marketers commonly confuse SMS open rates and SMS read rates. In email marketing, the two terms are defined as the following:
- Email Read: The total amount of people that open an email marketing message.
- Email Open: The amount of people that open an email marketing message with images automatically enabled. In most cases the open rate for email marketing will be less than the read rate.
In SMS marketing though open rates and read rates are defined differently. A “read” for an SMS marketing message is the total amount of people that see the SMS message, including a preview of the message.
An “open” for an SMS marketing message is when the consumers actually opens the message. There’s a significant difference between read and open rates with SMS marketing and email marketing.
What is SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing is when an organization sends one SMS message to thousands or even millions of customers who have signed up to receive SMS messages. SMS marketing is incredibly effective because, while emails can sit unopened in an inbox for hours — or worse, sent directly to the trash folder — 78% of consumers say that SMS is the fastest way to reach them. In fact, 90% of text messages are read within just 3 minutes. That makes SMS marketing a perfect channel for marketers who have a time-sensitive promotion or alert to share.
Why Are SMS Open Rates So High?
The main reason SMS open rates are so high is that SMS marketing requires a strict opt-in from customers before you can message them. How strict? It’s actually federal law that requires businesses to get an opt-in from a consumer prior to sending them an SMS message. The federal law is called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), and gives consumers the right to claim damages of up to $1,500 per message if they didn’t opt-in. For more information on the TCPA, check out this resource.
SMS Marketing Click-Through Rates
SMS open rates are very different than SMS click-through rates. Open rates are when someone opens an SMS message. Click-through rates are calculated by dividing the amount of people that clicked on a hyperlink in a message, by the amount of people that received that SMS message. So for example, if you send an SMS message to 10 people, and 3 of them click on the link in the SMS message, the click-through rate would be 30%.
While SMS click-through rates vary widely, we’ve found the average SMS marketing click-through rate is somewhere in the 5-10% range.
How to Increase SMS Open Rates
Below are four of our best SMS marketing strategies to increase the open rates of your SMS messages.
- The most important is to only send SMS messages to customers that opted-in to receive them.
- Make each SMS visually unique. If each of your SMS messages look the same, you’ll eventually start to see a decrease in open rates as customers won’t be enticed to open the messages.
- Make each SMS message valuable. If customers start to realize that there’s no value in the messages you’re sending them, they’ll eventually stop opening your messages, or worse unsubscribe.
- If you want your message to actually reach your customers’ mobile phones, use an SMS short code. In the United States, SMS short codes have very little filtering/blocking mechanisms, allowing your SMS message to get to your customers’ phones uninterrupted.
