Matt PaulsonFounder and CEO of MarketBeat

SMS Marketing: Keep Your Monthly Bill Manageable

4 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:11

In this interview, Matt Paulson explains how to control SMS marketing expenses while maintaining profitability. He notes that a typical SMS costs about one cent, dropping to roughly $0.006–$0.007 per message at high volumes. Their operation runs a $400,000 monthly SMS bill but generates $1.7–$1.8 million in monthly revenue, aiming for a 5 × revenue‑to‑cost ratio (i.e., $5 earned for every $1 spent on SMS fees). To keep costs manageable, they only text users who remain active; if a recipient hasn’t clicked a link in about 30 days, they cease regular messaging, occasionally sending a weekly re‑engagement text but no more. This strategy balances spend with active engagement to sustain a healthy profit margin.

Chapters

For SMS specifically, how do you keep the monthly bill manageable? How long does somebody need to go without clicking a link before you stop sending to them?
Yeah. So if you've only ever emailed before, haven't done SMS before, the first thing that will surprise you is just the cost. To send, you know, a text, it's typically about 1 cent. If you have a lot of volume, you can get that down to about 0.7 cents. The lowest I've ever seen it with carrier fees is like 0.0. Or 0.6 cents, or 0.006. I think we pay 0.0065 or something like that, I don't know exactly, but it's pretty expensive. Our SMS bill is $400,000 a month, but we also make like $1.7 million, $1.8 million a month. So I really like to look at the profit margin of SMS, and for every dollar that I spend on SMS fees, I wanna generate about $5 in revenue. The way that you keep it manageable is only by texting people that are active. So if somebody hasn't clicked on a text in about 30 days, we just stop texting at that point. Maybe we'll text them once a week to try to reactivate them, but we don't text very often past 30 days.