How does your business communicate with its clients? Healthcare providers: how do you let a patient know about an upcoming appointment? Property managers: how do you keep tenants updated on community events or notified about important information?

If your business relies on e-mail for these purposes, you’re not alone – and that could be a problem. The Harvard Business Review reports that professionals receive 120 new e-mails every workday. How do you make your e-mail stand out from the other 119? The best way may be to send them a text message instead.

With their concise content, immediate delivery, and quick accessibility – SMS messages are opened quickly and read far more often than e-mails. With a good SMS bulk-messaging system in place, businesses can communicate and engage with clients much more effectively and rapidly.

Quick to open, easy to read

E-mail notifications are opened about 20% of the time, after an average of 90 minutes. In other words, it usually takes over an hour to notify the recipients, and 80% of them don’t see it or simply ignore it. In comparison, SMS messages are opened 98% of the time after an average of 90 seconds. The difference is remarkable. This means that the average e-mail message takes 60 times longer to be read and is 40 times more likely to be ignored compared to an SMS notification.

Condensed, but not limited

Though sometimes named as a drawback, the 160-character limit on SMS messages is part of what makes it so much more likely to be read. You can’t bury the lead, and it can be read in less than 10 seconds. If you take into consideration that an average of 80% of e-mail recipients never see more than the subject line, it might have been better just to send it as a text message instead.

Of course, you can’t always say everything you need to say in 160 characters. But you can include a link to a webpage with the rest of the information, giving recipients the option to read it if they are interested. What good does the extra content in an e-mail do anyways, if its forty times more likely to be ignored?

No captive audience

Bulk SMS messaging requires recipients to opt-in before receiving any messages. While this is also technically the case with bulk e-mail messaging, signing up for SMS notifications is usually done more intentionally. An opt-in method that you have likely encountered is done by texting a single keyword to a short code phone number. This type of opt-in ensures that recipients have explicitly decided they want to receive SMS notifications, and opting out is often as easy as replying to a notification with “stop.” The ease of this system cultivates a highly engaged contact list.

Automation and optimization potential

SMS messaging can be automated in every way that bulk e-mail messaging can be, and it can incorporate the same level of specificity and personalization as well. Business SMS services can send individualized reminders for appointments, deliveries, payments, and more.

In addition to these capabilities, the built-in read receipt feature of SMS makes it easy to measure and track how quickly and how often specific recipients open messages, which can provide valuable insight on how you can optimize their experience.

The takeaway

When it comes to notifications, anything e-mail can do, SMS can do better. At the end of the day, e-mail is often an oversaturated means of communication with clients. Four out of five times, a given person on your e-mail list will not read more than the subject line (assuming they see it at all); and if it can fit in a subject line, it can fit in an SMS message.

SMS notifications are read faster, opened more often, received by a more engaged audience; and a business bulk-SMS solution has all the capabilities that e-mail notification systems have (except for getting buried in an inbox).

If you are interested in learning more about business SMS messaging and how to get started, contact us, and we can find a solution that works for your business.