Are you struggling with customer engagement? Do you find it hard to retain customers or in convert potential leads into sales? Or maybe, you are wondering what difference there is between SMS and email marketing and the impact each would have on your business.

Email and SMS marketing will help you strategically target and communicate with your customers seamlessly while helping you automate your campaigns.

Why do you need both Email and SMS marketing?

Utilizing an omnichannel marketing strategy helps you deliver superior customer experience across all channels. The two-pronged approach is timely, easily scalable and robust. You will also increase customer engagement by bolstering outreach and segmentation. Besides, your marketing customer retention can be improved by utilizing an email and SMS outreach program.

What’s the difference between Email and SMS?

The major difference is the permissible text length in the message. SMS allows short-length content without attachments. On the other hand, emails are good for long-form content that can be combined with multimedia attachments such as newsletters. SMS works better in delivering time-sensitive information while email is good at delivering interactive messages that include multimedia.

SMS marketing

SMS means short message service. The length of the text messages is capped at 160 characters by most mobile service providers. Based on the nature of the messages, texts need to be concise, direct, and easy to understand for a successful SMS marketing campaign. Besides, SMS automation tools allow you to schedule when different messages will be sent to customers and easily manage feedback.

How effective is it?

SMS marketing is mobile friendly, versatile, has a higher outreach and high open rates. Research by Digital doughnut shows that 75% of customers prefer SMS over email marketing. Besides, SMS marketing offers you a robust way to build stronger customer relationships.

When and how to use SMS marketing

A big win for SMS Marketing is recipients can still receive messages even when they are not connected to the internet. However, before starting your campaign, you need to understand and abide by its regulations. Also, the messages should disclose any charges that customers might incur as well as an opt-out option. Similarly, you should not message too much. This is so that they don’t come across as spam.

Email marketing

This entails sending emails to your clients directly. These could serve as a reminder of abandoned cart summaries, sales, and special offers. Personalized email campaigns make it even more robust as customers feel you have their best interest at heart.

Why it matters

Email marketing allows you to establish connections with leads, customers, and former clients. Besides, using email automation tools such as Retainly improves email open rate by up to 70%.

When to use it

Emails can deliver messages that are interactive and that incorporate any media.

You can leverage the use of links, images, and videos to build brand credibility, and brand recognition and increase traffic to social media pages or websites. Currently, you can employ an automated engagement platform to improve marketing automation in fast-paced business environments.

What is better: email or SMS marketing?

Both email and SMS prove to be vital marketing tools. However, combining them gives you a simple yet powerful marketing strategy. The approach is timely, robust, and easily scalable, from which you are guaranteed to increase engagements and high ROI.

The advantages of using an omnichannel marketing strategy

• Improves customer retention and brand loyalty
• Results in better customer engagements
• Enables you to reach more customers
• Data and insights from one channel can help you personalize other channels

How can omnichannel marketing improve customer engagement?

Using multiple channels to promote a similar message helps you reach more customers. You can utilize email to notify customers of a sale offer or promotion, then send a reminder SMS on D-day. That way, you will drive more traffic and sales. Besides, with omnichannel marketing, you can engage with your customer on their preferred channel by sending them relevant messages. You can also use retargeting across various platforms to foster customer retention.

Should you invest in email & SMS marketing?

Using an omnichannel marketing approach has numerous advantages:

• Increased customer retention rates
• Better turnovers
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Improved marketing efficiency

When customer expectations are higher than ever and competition intensifies, Retainly offers an automated omnichannel customer engagement platform that helps you do more with less. This will help optimize your email campaign while reducing the burden on your marketing team.