Email Marketing vs Text Marketing - Which is better?

Video we're going to discuss email marketing versus text message marketing. Which one's best for your business, which do we recommend, and how you can utilize both of these marketing tools for your business. Alright, so the first thing we're going to look at is some of these important metrics that we need to know. So when you send out an email, and let's say you send out 100 emails and 100 text messages, the average open rates right now are 15 to 25% open rates for emails. So specifically we have some clients that are getting 40 to 50% open rates, but 15 to 25% is average. And this also ties into your frequency of how often you're sending emails. And we'll discuss that as we get down here. When it comes to text messages, what we found is that 95% of text messages get opened because everyone is on their phone. And so we know that if you have a text message, nine times out of 10, you're going to open it or you're at least going to read it when it pops up on your screen. So in my opinion, what's better here is obviously a 95% open rate. If you want to get in front of your customers faster, text is going to be the winner for sure. All right, response times. So you send out an email and then what is the frequency that someone actually responds to that email? And this is very hard to track when it comes to your. You can track a reply rate, but it's hard to track a response time. And so our reply rates that we found is around 1 to 2%, whether that's from taking action from the email or responding to the email. So, for example, hey, here's a $35 off coupon. Email us back here if you want. That voucher, for example, is an email that you could send that someone would take action on. And what we found with text message and the other thing with email is that the response times is very rarely. Do you see someone responding right away to emails. It kind of lingers in their inbox for a little bit. So we say three to five hours until someone actually like looks at it and responds. All right, and then so for text messaging, what we found was that when we send out a text message, we usually get a 3 to 5% response rate. Now it can be higher. It all depends on the offer that you're, or whatever you're sending out. Like for example, if you send out, hey, text us back to confirm your appointment for tomorrow, that response is going to be, you know, 100% 90%. But if you send out, hey, here's an offer for, you know, $5 off or something, the response rate is going to be drastically less. And what we found is that if you have like a 3 to 5% response rate, that's about average. Again, there's a broad spectrum of response rates. As far as time goes. What we found was that three minutes is a good response time. And again, this is because of the open rates are so high. People are right on their phone, they're looking at it. So again, when it comes to response time, text messaging is going to be the way to do it if you want to get people in front of people and have them respond to you. All right, so now when it comes to frequency, this is where things change a little bit. And this is where it is important to be very strategic with the way that you use these marketing channels. And with email. We have some clients that send out monthly newsletters and we have some that send out weekly activity or not necessarily newsletters, but more like updates. For example, a realtor would send out like just listed in, you know, this city. And you could do that every week for all your activity and stuff. So weekly activity, email, and those emails, they get pretty good open rates and, you know, good responses, good top of mind. But what we found was that with text messaging, obviously people don't want to be bombarded with text messages because there is such high open rates. So you have to be very strategic with the way that you use, you're texting. And so what we recommend is at the most sending out a text quarterly. But it's even better to do like every six months or more on special occasions, if you're slow and you need to drum up business, do that. But having something either like a quarterly drip campaign of some sort or like every six months is much better. So I'm going to put six months. And so in my opinion, email, for a frequency of being top of mind is going to be better for this. And so this is the way that we would recommend using text and email marketing. So email is more sphere of influence, making sure that people are aware of the services that you offer, making sure that maybe if you do carpet cleaning that they know that you also do a new flooring installation or if you do roofing, that they know that you do siding or whatever it is. But it's just the top of mind added value of getting things in your email that people are accustomed to subscribing to newsletters and things because they're interested in, you know, what you're up to, what's going on, that kind of stuff. More of a passive, oh yeah, this company is so cool. Let me see what they're up to. That's the way we would recommend using email. You can still use email marketing for, for specials. The only thing is that you can see that your open rates are going to be less than text messaging. If you were to send offers, and you can send a lot more offers like in every single monthly newsletter, you could include an offer in the newsletter and so you could still utilize it for sending offers. But what we found with using text message marketing is to be very strategic with the way that you use it and most importantly to use it for lead generation and offers. So for example, sending out a text message like, hey, hey, we're going to be, it's time for your oil change. Give us a text, text us back here and we'll get you on the schedule. Hey, thanks so much for using us. Here's $50 voucher that you can refer to a friend, have them use this code when they schedule with us. Right. So these are some examples of ways that you can use text messages. But again, people do not want to be bombarded with texts and all these offers. And so that's how we would structure this. The other thing I found, and this is a cool diagram of the evolution of customer communication. So obviously people used to send telegrams a long time ago. Then it was postcards, which there is still a use case for postcards. But these numbers, open rates and response rates and frequency all change for postcards. They're not dead. But it's much harder to get in front of people unless you send out a mass amount of postcards. Then people had catalogs where they would send out, hey, this is what's going on over here. Here's a magazine or a quarterly, you know, this or that. And then it went to emails, which still there's a place for emails. And then things are slowly moving into the text phase of communicating with customers. And so I'll put some links down below that might be beneficial to help you when it comes to email or text marketing. If you're interested, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post content about growing local service businesses and we will see you in the next video.