Look in your inbox right now. Go ahead, we’ll wait. What did you see? A lot of spam? A note from your mother that you have been meaning to read for weeks? A lot of emails slip through the cracks, some information is too important to slip through those cracks.

Now picture yourself as company that has mission critical information to send to your users. Maybe you are an airline or a mortgage broker, real-time communication with your customers is imperative. Or imagine that you are a marketer who wants to send engaging content to prospects. One of the main issues marketers need to weigh when they are doing outreach is what channel is going to guarantee them the most engagement. We know email campaigns from brands have about a 23% overall open rate whereas SMS open and read rates are at 98%. SMS additionally boasts an impressive 40% clickthrough rate and a 30% conversion rate. On its face this is a slam dunk win for SMS, however, due to compliance regulations, many territories require users to opt-in to receive SMS. This leaves marketers in a quandary, but today we are going to discuss a hybrid marketing approach; using e-mail campaigns to ask users to opt-in to SMS.

Looking at the numbers

Ok, let’s briefly shift back to email campaigns. We know everybody does them because, well we have an inbox. The number of branded emails we receive each day is shockingly high. It’s one of the reasons we dread booting up the old work laptop after a vacation. But if we dive into the numbers, these campaigns are more than an annoyance for consumers, they are largely ineffective for marketers. The open rates for e-mails are a dismal 15%, clickthrough rates rarely break 3% and conversion rates hover around 1%. For a marketer looking to justify their budget to a CEO demanding growth, the above statistics are…bad.

But let’s narrow our scope a bit to look at only email campaigns that ask users to opt-in to SMS communication. Looking at industry data, we know that 48 million consumers opted-in to SMS last year. That’s a big number! But how did brands secure that opt-in? We know from the previous paragraph that e-mail campaigns are rubbish. Or are they?

The SMS difference

When we look at email campaigns that specifically asked users to opt-in to SMS communication, the click-through rate balloons from 3%, to 10.5%. That is nearly a 400% increase! And why is that? It’s simple, an email opt-in campaign isn’t selling a product, it isn’t asking you to sign up for a webinar or fill out a form on a landing page. The specific ask is to open a new line of communication for the user’s benefit. We have learned that a lot of people want to be able to communicate with brands through SMS. So, we look at these numbers and the math works in a marketers’ favor.

By getting a user to opt-in to a channel with high engagement (98% open rate, 30% conversion) you are increasing your chances of generating those leads even if you may have a smaller bucket from which to generate these leads. The average opt-out for receiving SMS is less than 5%, so running a specific campaign to ask people to receive your SMS updates offers little downside.

Whether you are a marketer or just a company looking for an easier way to break through the noise and communicate with your customers, SMS has dozens of helpful use cases, from generating sales, to offering support or just shepherding users through a solid customer experience. Contact Mitto today to learn how to run an effective, high engagement, email SMS opt-in campaign, so that your users will never miss out on important information again.