Email is your most cost-effective and versatile channel. SMS is your highest-urgency, highest-response channel. This week we cover how the world's best-performing teams integrate them.
This Week’s Lesson
Email is your workhorse: suited for detailed content, education, storytelling, relationship-building, and anything that benefits from a longer format. Subscribers tolerate receiving email regularly — even daily for content-forward brands.
SMS is your interrupt: suited for time-sensitive alerts, transactional confirmations, flash promotions, and anything where immediate delivery is critical. SMS open rates are 95%+ within 3 minutes. But the tolerance for promotional SMS is much lower — subscribers opt out faster.
Strategic integration: use email to nurture and educate. Use SMS to drive urgent action. An e-commerce flow might look like: Day 0: cart abandonment email. Day 1: cart abandonment SMS reminder (if email wasn't opened/clicked). Day 3: follow-up email with social proof.
Cross-channel suppression: if a subscriber completes the desired action (makes a purchase), suppress them from the remaining cart-abandonment flow across both channels. Nothing erodes trust faster than receiving three abandoned cart messages after you've already bought.
Consent requirements: SMS marketing requires explicit opt-in consent that is separate from email consent in the US (TCPA) and Canada (CASL). Pre-checking 'Also receive SMS' in an email signup form does not constitute valid SMS consent.
Channel preference: a surprising number of subscribers prefer transactional notifications via SMS but educational content via email. A preference center that lets subscribers choose per-channel per-content-type delivers the best of both worlds.