Why You Should Be Using SMS to Amplify Your Email Strategy

This case study is presented by Mailchimp, which gives you one platform for both email and SMS. It’s perfect for sending time-sensitive offers, alerts, and more. You can send the right message to the right readers, and track all of your results in one place. It’s easier than ever to drive growth with SMS — start now with Mailchimp.

You probably don’t need me to convince you of the power of email. Whether you’re a large newsroom with dozens of newsletters or an independent writer writing a single newsletter, you rely on email to do a lot: Engage with your audience, share content, build a regular reading habit, and drive revenue.

But in the dozen years I’ve worked in the email space, I’ve been trying to figure out: What’s the right platform to pair with a newsletter? Email does so many things, but I think it’s important to build relationships in other places, too. More touchpoints with a reader typically leads to more loyalty and more revenue. But where should you build? On social media? Through podcasts? Print?

The data suggests that there’s a clear answer: SMS. It’s Robin to email’s Batman.

Done right, SMS represents a significant opportunity for audience engagement and revenue. 12% of readers who receive an SMS click on a link, per Mailchimp’s latest data. For comparison’s sake, on average, only about 2-3% of the readers who receive your emails click. And when you use email and SMS together, Mailchimp’s data shows that you’ll see a 97% higher click rate.

But what I often see are teams trying to use SMS in the exact way they use email. That leads to poor results. These tools are designed for specific purposes — not used as 1-1 replacements for one another. 

Think of it this way: Email is like having a full toolbox of tools. SMS is like having a Swiss Army knife. You can use each in very specific and often complementary ways. When you do, you’ll drive a lot more clicks, build a larger, more engaged audience, and give yourself the chance to make more money, too.

In this case study, let’s talk about how to get the most out of your SMS strategy. I’ll walk through:

• Four core use cases for SMS
• How to use email and SMS together
• Tactics to grow your SMS list
• Questions to ask before you start building an SMS strategy

Ready? Let’s dive in.

Four core uses cases for SMS

Texting (also known as SMS, or Short Message Service) has a number of built-in advantages. It’s great for driving clicks or action. It generates a ton of replies — readers are used to writing back to family and friends who text them, so replying to SMS messages is a built-in habit. It can be a game-changer when it comes to sharing time-sensitive messages. A reader might miss that urgent email, but when an SMS notification pops up on their phone, they’re likely to see it and act. Many teams have seen great results using SMS to convert readers into supporters or buyers. 

But it also does something you might not expect: You can set up automations with SMS, just like you can with email. Those automations tend to be fairly simple — i.e. if that happens, then send this message — but it’s something you can lean into.

What that in mind, I find that SMS is most often used in these four ways:

• You can use it to share editorial content.
• You can use it for marketing.
• You can use it to sell things.
• You can use it after a transaction happens.

So let’s go through those use cases one by one.

Editorial use cases

The most common way I see editorial teams use SMS is also one of the most obvious: For breaking news alerts. While large newsrooms often send breaking news notifications, sent via their app, I think there are two clear advantages to using SMS for these instead: 

1. You can reach a wider audience (not everyone will download an app, but everyone has access to an SMS inbox).
2. You can share longer messages through SMS (many app notification tools only allow for short messages).

A newsroom like Punchbowl News does a good job with their breaking news alerts. They don’t send a message for everything — just the truly big news in politics. It means a reader might get fewer than three alerts per week on their phone, but when their name shows up on your phone, you know it’s something important.

Alerts around other topics, like the weather or your local sports team, might also make sense for SMS.

With how personal the SMS inbox is, it makes sense to think about having specific people behind each SMS message. The New York Post does a pretty good job with that. For instance, they have beat writers covering certain sports teams, like the New York Yankees, who send behind-the-scenes updates and news directly to readers’ phones. There are two great advantages here:

1. On SMS, they’re posting the kind of stuff that used to go out via channels like Twitter, but instead of making those posts free to everyone, they’re sharing them just with their most loyal, engaged subscribers. (The Post makes texting a feature available exclusively to paying subscribers.)
2. Their reporters can ask specific questions of the audience, and readers can easily write back with their thoughts. From there, you can actually text back individual readers and start a conversation.

Others are using SMS to share newsletter content a reader might have missed. (You’d text them a one-sentence note with a link to the newsletter.) I’d be cautious with this sort of strategy — I only recommend resending a message to non-openers for very important newsletters.

Some teams are even using SMS to produce a daily news product. The Daily Text, for instance, sends out a daily list of six stories you need to know. It has a lot of the elements of a daily newsletter product, except it’s a little bit shorter than your typical newsletter and delivered via SMS. (Do note: Sending longer texts comes at a cost. I’ll explain more in the Questions section of this case study.)

Marketing use cases

SMS is great for alerting readers to important new features, benefits, or action steps. For instance, let’s say you’re a newsroom launching a new product, like a daily crossword puzzle. SMS can get the word out about that feature and drive readers to play the puzzle.

SMS can be really useful for getting readers to fill out a survey or a petition. Lots of prominent non-profits, for instance, like the ACLU, use it to drive awareness and drive clicks to things like time-sensitive petitions.

Another really good use case, I found, is using SMS for events. You can send out SMS messages to get people to register for an event and then send reminders leading up to the event about what’s happening, when you need to arrive, and any other key details. You can do this sort of thing with email too, but an SMS alert — “Reminder: Join us in 10 minutes for the webinar!” — might drive better results.

Revenue use cases

SMS can be really effective for super-specific messages, like sales deals or special offers. If you’re a non-profit, you’ll probably want to send SMS messages during a big fundraising campaign, reminding readers to donate to a specific cause or that there may be matching funds available. If you’re a newsroom, a message about a discounted offer — sent a day or two after a marketing email is sent but not clicked on — could be a smart strategy.

You can use SMS for abandoned cart messages. If someone starts the process of buying something but doesn’t finish it, you can send them a text message reminding them to come back to support your work or buy a product.

You can also use SMS for specific automations after someone pays. What next steps do you want them to take? Maybe you want them to sign up for more of your SMS channels. Maybe you want them to fill out a survey or check out a new benefit available to them. You can set up those simple automations to drive specific actions at specific moments in their journey.

Transactional use cases

SMS works really well for specific transactions. The messages are quick and direct — the equivalent of saying, “Hey, there’s something you need to do in the next five minutes.”

Let’s say you’re trying to get a reader to renew their paid support, like a subscription, membership, or donation to your publication or non-profit. You’re probably sending email messages about this in the days leading up to renewal, but it can also be helpful to send an SMS message as well, reminding them that their credit card is going to be charged. If they have questions or issues, they can reply to the message and reach someone on your team. (Mailchimp has an Inbox feature where you can manage and reply to all of these messages.)

If someone’s free trial or paid support lapses, you can use SMS to win them back. Remind them what they’re missing out on and share a special offer to nudge them to come back. You can use email to reduce churn as well, but SMS gives you another touchpoint to win back these readers.

One of the most common reasons for cancellation of a paid subscription or membership is because a supporter’s credit card expired or changed. When that happens, their recurring payment fails. This is a great use case for SMS. Send an urgent message reminding them, “Hey, there’s a credit card issue you need to fix. Update your card information here,” and send a link to their account page.

How to use email and SMS together

The email inbox is such an important place to be. I’ve always thought of it as a digital living room, where family, subscribers, and a handful of lucky guests (family, friends, maybe your newsletter) are let in.

The SMS inbox is an even more intimate channel. I like to think of SMS like a Thanksgiving dinner table. An exclusive group of family and friends — and maybe individuals or brands — gets invited to the table. Everyone gets the chance to share their ideas at the table.

But if someone crosses the line — in this case: If they send too much, if they send unwanted content, and definitely if they act like a spammer — they’re going to get kicked out.

I mentioned SMS’s strengths earlier, but let’s take a step back, see where there’s overlap and opportunity with email.

What email does well	What SMS does well
• Building habit	• Driving clicks and action
• Telling big stories	• Generating replies
• Driving traffic to multiple places from one send	• Sharing time-sensitive messages
• Complex automations	• Simple automations
• Converting readers into supporters or buyers	• Converting readers into supporters or buyers

There’s lots of overlap here. Both channels can drive traffic or help you sell things. But they do so in different ways.

How might you use email and SMS together? I’ve got a few ideas.

Let’s say you’re a local news publisher. You’d start with your SMS editorial strategy. You’ve probably got your daily newsletter highlighting the day’s big stories. What are you going to use SMS for that’s a bit different? You’d start by sending occasional breaking news alerts.

Then you’d start to think about automations, like a welcome series. Your email welcome series is pretty straightforward: You’d introduce your team, share top-performing stories, and ask readers to support your work, all in the first 30 days after they sign up for your newsletter.

With SMS, you’d find moments to add value during that welcome journey. Maybe you want to drive people to some of your upcoming events. You could set up an automated SMS message, sent a week or two after someone signs up, to drive readers to your events page. Or maybe you’d send an SMS message giving people the chance to opt in to specific SMS messages, like an alert.

Then think about your marketing strategy. Lots of publishers will have campaigns, like an end-of-year campaign, to try to convert readers into supporters. Your campaign might last a few weeks, with different stories and messages encouraging readers to subscribe, become a member, or donate.

You can build SMS into this strategy, too. Identify specific readers who opened a campaign email but did not support your work, and send them an SMS encouraging them to do so before the campaign is over. Maybe they’re about to miss out on a special offer or the chance to have their donation matched. Those urgent messages are a great fit for SMS.

Email and SMS can work together to retain your supporters, too. Email’s great for sending supporter-only newsletters where you highlight top stories, share behind-the-scenes content, and show the value of your work. But when it comes time to get readers to pay again, SMS really shines. Let’s say your supporter wants to renew, but their credit card on file has expired. A quick SMS message is a great way to get readers to fix the issue.

How to grow your SMS list

So many of the tactics that work to grow an email list also work for SMS. It’s a matter of asking for a phone number, not just an email address.

Start by creating forms on any landing pages, so readers can opt in for the chance to receive newsletters, SMS messages, or both. My recommendation: Make the SMS field optional. That way, if they want to ignore it, that’s okay. If they do give you a phone number, they can opt in for additional messages, and it gives you a second, really valuable touchpoint with these readers.

Anywhere you ask for a phone number — like a checkout page or event registration pages — ask if they want to sign up for SMS messages too. Make sure you’re clear about what they’re opting into: Editorial alerts, texts about their account, or maybe something else.

Let’s say you ask for a phone number when someone’s buying a ticket to one of your events, and there’s a checkbox to receive SMS messages. Are they just getting messages about that event, or are they signing up for regular marketing messages or editorial updates? Make sure you tell them so users can opt into the messages they want.

You can try other basic tactics, too, like running pop-ups on site promoting SMS, or creating lead magnets, where a reader trades their phone number in exchange for a valuable resource.

You should absolutely ask them to sign up for SMS during key steps in the reader’s journey to becoming a supporter or customer. In your welcome series, send an email encouraging them to sign up for SMS. Ask them after they pay to support your work or buy a product. Include a note about SMS in your renewal series, sent via email — if they sign up and start getting content in their SMS inbox, they may be less likely to churn.

One unique thing you can use to drive SMS growth: Shortcodes. A platform like Mailchimp will give you a 5-6 digit number that readers can text to sign up for your SMS messages. It’s an easy thing to tell readers: Text this phrase to this number, and you’ll be signed up. You can also apply for a vanity short code through the Short Code Registry. (For instance, if you ran a newsroom in Utah, you could buy the shortcode UTNews. As of this writing, it’s still available.) One thing to note there: A vanity shortcode will cost you $1,000 per month.

You can always think about pairing shortcodes with other tactics. For instance: I love this example from Andscape, which showed a pop-up to mobile users promoting SMS. After someone clicked, it popped open a pre-filled message to send to their shortcode and register for their SMS channel.

Questions to ask before you start building an SMS strategy

Before you dive into SMS, there are a few more things that you’ll want to keep in mind.

What metrics should I measure?

SMS metrics are a bit different than email metrics. You might have seen reports that SMS open rates are as high as 98%. The problem: What’s often described as open rate could be more accurately described as “delivery rate” — the percentage of SMS messages successfully delivered to readers.

When measuring the success of SMS, I tell teams to optimize for three things: Clicks, replies, and revenue. Those are the three that senders like Mailchimp can most accurately measure.

How much does it cost to send SMS messages?

While many email service providers charge for email based on the size of your contact list, SMS pricing is a lot more confusing. I think confusion about pricing is one of the reasons many teams don’t test out SMS. I’ll try to simplify things for you.

SMS pricing is based on credits. Through a sender like Mailchimp, you need 1 credit to send a single 153 character (or less) message.

To give you a sense of costs on Mailchimp:

• 1,000 credits = $20/mo
• 10,000 credits = $90/mo
• 100,000 credits = $600/mo

But if your SMS message is longer than that, one message may require 2+ credits to send, and your costs will quickly rise.

There are other reasons a single message may cost more than a single credit. 

• If you add emojis to your SMS message, you can only put 63 characters into a message, not 153.
• If you add images or videos, that turns your SMS into an MMS (or Multimedia Messaging Service), which may require multiple credits. 
• If you send non-U.S. phone numbers, that will require additional credits. And the number of credits varies wildly. (Through Mailchimp, you need 2 credits to send a single message to a phone number based in Portugal, but 12 credits to send to someone with a Dutch phone number.)

The good news: Platforms like Mailchimp will show you character count as you type out your message, and if you go beyond a single credit, they’ll let you know. They also have a built-in tool that can suggest ways to shorten a message in order to reduce the number of credits spent.

Are there other Mailchimp SMS features I should know about?

There are a few things to mention. You can insert merge tags — things like a reader’s first or last name — automatically into messages, just like with email. If you’re struggling with honing your SMS voice, the builder can suggest ways to adjust the tone of the message for you. Like with any email platform, you can send a test message to your phone so you can make sure the message and all links are working correctly.

And last but not least: You can also A/B test an SMS message to make sure you’re sending the most effective version out to your readers.

Does SMS have email-like inbox filters?

It does, depending on the device you use. For Apple users running newer versions of iOS, for instance, you’ll find that there are multiple folders where an SMS message might end up:

• Messages
• Unknown Senders
• Transactions
• Promotions
• Spam

That’s why it’s so important to send messages via a trusted sender, like Mailchimp, and to send only the messages that readers have specifically opted in for. Send the stuff readers ask for and click on, and you’ll end up alongside family and friends in the main Messages folder. Send unwanted content and you may end up in a lesser folder, where your messages are unlikely to be seen. 

What else can I do to establish trust in the SMS inbox?

A platform like Mailchimp allows you to customize the short URLs that appear in your messages. Instead of using the shortener that Mailchimp provides (i.e. https://mcsms.io/df7j3x), you can create something with your brand’s name instead. That way, when readers see the message, they know it’s coming from you, and not a spammer.

You can also add your brand’s name at the start of the message (i.e. “Inbox Collective:”) — kind of like using the Sent-From name for a newsletter, but you’d be adding it to the body of the message instead.

Senders like Mailchimp can also institute what’s known as “quiet hours,” which are times outside normal business hours when SMS messages can’t be delivered. That way, if you’re based in the U.S., but you’re sending to a reader in, say, New Zealand, they’re not woken up by SMS messages arriving in the middle of the night.

It’s also worth regularly reminding readers that if they text STOP to any message, they’ll be unsubscribed from your SMS channel. No one wants to lose readers, but you’d much rather have readers opt out instead of flagging your messages as spam.

Are there any other compliance rules I need to know about?

There are several different laws that govern SMS messages in the U.S., including the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the CAN-SPAM Act. Several states, including California, Oklahoma, and Washington, have their own laws. (You can read more about the state-by-state laws here.) In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation governs text messaging.

But the short version: If you obtain consent from readers to send messages, send just the messages they’ve asked for, and work with a sender, like Mailchimp, that handles the behind-the-scenes compliance piece, you’re doing most of what you need to do to abide by SMS rules.

Any final pieces of advice around SMS?

I’ve got four for you:

1.) If you’re new at SMS, pick one use case to start with — ideally something with a high return on investment, like marketing or sales messages. That way, you can justify the initial additional expense.

2.) SMS isn’t an “everything” app. Use it for messages that drive a very specific action — a payment, a click, a reply. The more you lean into action with SMS, the better it will perform for you.

3) Think about these four steps: “Test, measure, adjust — and repeat.” If you’ve got an idea for SMS, be willing to test it out. Make sure you can measure the results through clicks, revenue, or replies. Adjust based on the results. And then start all over again with a new hypothesis. Do that, over and over again, and you’ll slowly figure out what works for your team when it comes to SMS.

4.) Whatever you do with SMS, just don’t be a spammer. It’s easy to overdo it with SMS — once you see the urgency drives clicks, it’s easy to go too far and constantly send urgent messages to your readers (even if the topic isn’t all that urgent.) Remember: You’re reaching an incredibly personal part of someone’s digital space. Your goal isn’t just to drive a click or a sale today — it’s to keep your space in the SMS inbox for years to go. And if your sending strategy annoys you, it’s going to annoy your users, too. Be cautious, and build from there.

This case study is presented by Mailchimp, which gives you one platform for both email and SMS. It’s perfect for sending time-sensitive offers, alerts, and more. You can send the right message to the right readers, and track all of your results in one place. It’s easier than ever to drive growth with SMS — start now with Mailchimp.