20 SMS Marketing Statistics 2022 You Need to Know

In this article, we’ve put together 20 SMS marketing statistics for 2022 that are a must to know for marketers and other businesses using SMS as part of their communication channels. SMS is not dead, it’s actually alive and kicking! SMS are faster than any other channel and have the best open rates. If you are planning to send bulk texts to your potential customers in just a few clicks, then keep reading this article. We will talk about:

1. What Is SMS Marketing?
2. Why Use SMS Marketing?
3. What Do Consumers Think of SMS Marketing?
4. How Effective Is SMS Marketing?
5. SMS Marketing Statistics
6. How to Do SMS Marketing?

What Is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing refers to sending promotional or transactional campaigns via text messaging. The text messages are instant, quick, and opened within seconds. How quick? SMS are delivered within 5 seconds and opened within 90 seconds.

Marketers use SMS marketing as part of their multi-channel marketing strategy because it’s cost effective, scalable, and effective. Also, businesses use SMS to send out special offers, coupons, discount codes or surveys. They can track open rates, replies, customer engagement and satisfaction.

Why Use SMS Marketing?

SMS is a great way to grab customers’ attention. Usually, people are required to opt-in to receive SMS marketing offers and promotions. Moreover, SMS marketing can easily be integrated with other channels like email, CRM or contact centre management systems. In marketing campaigns, many brands choose SMS as a reminder or follow-up for customers to open their emails. Usually these reminders increase email open rates by 20-30%.

SMS can be used as triggers for rich media campaigns. By clicking the link in the SMS, customers can open personalized mobile landing pages. The art of the possible in the Rich Media Messaging campaigns triggered by SMS are endless. For instance, ecommerce businesses can decrease abandonment cart, sell more, send order confirmations, delivery updated and gather more feedback.

What Do Customers Think of SMS Channel?

A 2012 study conducted by the UK Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that a third of Americans said they would rather receive offers such as mobile marketing coupons in a text. In France, 60% of consumers prefer to receive offers via text, according to the research. On the other hand, 61% of Australians find SMS appointments reminder useful. And they’re not the only ones. Who doesn’t like to get a delivery reminder with specific a time and date?

How Effective Is SMS?

When it comes to mobile marketing, many businesses focus on apps. And while apps are great for interactive experiences like gaming and social media, they’re not ideal for quick communications. Therefore, consumers are starting to turn away from them. We investigated the differences between push notifications and SMS. You can find our results here.

Another alternative is email, but it has very low open and click through rates. We’ve seen an average of 20% of emails being opened and only 2% of the links are clicked. On the other hand, SMS messages are read in the first 3 minutes, with 82% of people saying that they open every text they receive and with 19% of links in the SMS being clicked.

This is music to all marketers’ ears. So, high open rates, amazing engagement rates and the look and feel of an app and email? It’s ideal when you want to say something quick and make it easy for your customer to respond.

SMS Marketing Statistics

1. 64% of consumers think businesses should contact them via SMS more often.
2. 75% of consumers want to receive texts with special offers.
3. About 61% of marketers still don’t use SMS. If you start now, you’ll be on the cutting edge.
4. The use of SMS marketing grew 197% as a strategy in B2B efforts from 2015 to 2017.
5. Consumers in the US prefer SMS over voice calls for customer service.
6. 4.5x of customers as likely to respond to texts.
7. When customers are faced with appointment reminders and scheduling confirmations, the majority would rather do it through text than through phone calls, at a rate of 67%.
8. It takes the average person 90 seconds to respond to a text message.
9. Among the 18–34-year-old age bracket, text is the preferred channel for notifications from businesses.
10. 60% fewer agent resources were required because of automated SMS.
11. Millennials prefer to receive texts from businesses for appointment reminders (62%), delivery notifications (59%), and payment reminders (48%).
12. 53% prefer SMS for fraud and service outage messages compared to 34% for email.
13. SSE Airtricity used SMS and RMM to boost late bill collections by 49%.
14. 29% of SMS marketing recipients click on links in SMS messages.
15. SMS can reduce missed appointments by 80%.
16. Financial services can dramatically improve their collection rates and reduce the involvement from their customer service teams by 60% with SMS.
17. Two-way SMS can improve net promoter scores and improve efficiency by roughly 80%.
18. SMS alerts helps financial brands appeal to consumers’ emotions by reducing financial anxiety.
19. 60% of retail customers switched to SMS rather than calling contact centres.
20. 23 billion text messages are sent each day worldwide.

How to Do SMS Marketing?

It’s simple. Here’s how to start:

1. Create an account with VoiceSage.
2. Create your content group (make sure your customers are opted-in to receive marketing communication from you).
3. Create your SMS campaign (takes under 2 minutes).
4. Create your RMM campaign if you want to grab even more attention.
5. Finally, send your SMS campaign.

Of course you can analyze purchase history and location-based demographics, so you can send the right message, at the right time, to the right customer. So make sure you segment your clients for targeted promotions. For instance, no one wants to send an anti-wrinkle cream coupon for a store in London to a teenager living in Manchester.

And lastly, there are lots of misconceptions on SMS analytics and how much data you can track from a campaign. In general, marketers have a love and hate relationship with data. Most of the time, it’s hard to measure precisely what worked in your marketing campaign. It’s a lot and every customer is different.

So, we made it easier for you to track specific metrics. For example, in our Rich Media Messaging campaigns we can track at a per pixel level and create detailed and custom reports for you. Here is a bit more information on our solution.

In conclusion, SMS marketing is the perfect channel to promote a business’s products and services, as well as building customer loyalty. We offer competitive pricing and lots of SMS solutions. Book a demo today and find out.