Is It Best to Text or Email Prospects & Clients?

I don’t know about you…

but personally, I’ve noticed I’ve been receiving more and more texts from companies about marketing information.

Which brought me to the question… is it better to text or email marketing info in 2021?

About 54% of consumers say that they want to receive marketing info via text message,

however, only 11% of companies send them!

It’s also worth noting that texts have a 99% open rate and 95% of texts will be read within 3 minutes of being sent.

WOWZERS!

Check out the pros and cons of texting vs. emailing your prospects and clients

Texting Pro: Faster Response

The average text message gets read and responded to in ninety seconds — compared to about ninety minutes for an email.

When you think about how texting works versus how email works, it makes sense that the response time is so different.

With email, you have to check your email app in order to see that you got an email, and you’ll have so many other emails that any one email might get lost.

With text messages, you immediately are notified on the phone that you got the message, and you get fewer so the messages don’t get lost.

In this case, the advantage definitely goes to text messages.

Texting Con: It Has To Be Short

When you send someone an email, you can make it pretty much as long as you want.

You can include graphics and even embed full videos if you want.

Text messages, on the other hand, in order to be sendable to the widest audience have to be just text.

They also have to be pretty short — there’s a limit on how many letters and spaces you can send at once.

That being the case, you have to really think about every word you use in order to make the most of that space.

Email Pro: Easier To Search

When you send someone a text message, it becomes the top message on their mobile device.

After time passes, that text message gets a bit buried and searching for it gets a little bit harder.

Searching for an email message can be a lot simpler, and people who search for their emails can search for it in a number of ways.

They can search for the name of your company, which may not appear in a search for a text, and they can even search for the subject of the email.

Because of the fact that email can be pretty much as long as you want it to be, you can include more detail and make it more searchable.

[Related: 9 Effective Email Marketing Tips for Painting Contractors]

Email Con: Can Get Lost In Spam

Years ago, you pretty much were guaranteed to land in someone’s email inbox if you sent them an email.

As time has passed, email companies have created filters and the spam email box inside email.

What this means is that people’s email programs scan through the text of email and decide if it is spam.

If the program decides the email is spam (and the sender is not in their special list of senders that is considered okay) the person never sees it.

Unless your company’s email address is in their approved sender list, there’s a chance they won’t see your email.

Texting Pro: It’s More Convenient

Something people often make about modern society is that people as a whole spend too much time on their phones.

They stare at their phones and it’s almost become a joke that a quick way to get their attention is to send them a text message.

The message alert just pops up on their screen and wanting to make the notification go away (and just out of curiosity) people will look at the text.

People get so many emails, on the other hand, that they’re not just going to look at their email every time they get an email notification.

Texting Con: It’s Difficult To Transmit Tone

With your average email, you will be able to send things like pictures, video, and even colorful text that can help show tone.

With a text message, on the other hand, you generally will be limited to plain text – and it can be a lot harder to show tone or emotion with it.

That being the case, you have to be a lot more careful about what words you use so you don’t end up maybe upsetting people with the wrong word choice.

There are some ways you can show tone even with just text — think about adding emojis to your text messages to help with this.

It’s pretty impressive what happens when you add a couple of smiley faces ??? to your text message, or even a ❤️ heart ❤️ or two.

Email Pro: Lower Cost

Sending text messages may be convenient for the people receiving them, but for you sending them they can cost a lot more.

If you look at a good email program, it can be as little as thirty dollars a month to send an unlimited number of emails.

A text messaging program, on the other hand, can cost a hundred and fifty dollars to get you a few thousand messages.

If you would want more messages, it would cost you substantially more, with fifty thousand text messages costing two thousand dollars a month.

Email Con: Low Open Rate

On top of the possibility that your email is going to end up in a spam box, never to be seen, it is one of many emails your client will get.

With that being true, it will be hard to be sure that the email that you send them is going to be seen, opened, and read.

Of course, there are ways to improve your chances of your email being seen — the subject being one of the most important ones.

If you aren’t as careful, however, you might find that more of your emails are delivered — but not read.

The good news is that depending on what email program you use, you can see how many people open and read your emails.

Based on the information you get, you can improve the quality of your subjects so that more get opened and read.