When to text and when to email

In today's Mailbites, we talk about SMS and email together, the two channels every brand now runs, and the mistake of treating a text message as just a shorter, louder email.

Now, onto today's story.

The Story

SMS has earned its place in the marketing stack. Texts get opened almost instantly, they cut through in a way email can't, and for the right message they convert beautifully. But the brands that get SMS wrong almost always make the same error: they treat it as another broadcast channel, a second list to blast the same promotions to. Do that, and you don't double your reach. You annoy people on two channels instead of one, and get muted on both.

The two channels are not the same medium, and the difference is intimacy. Email lives in a space people expect to be marketed to; the inbox is a place for newsletters and offers and brands, and a daily email is normal there. A text message lives next to messages from their mother. It's the most personal channel you'll ever have access to, which is exactly why it's so easy to abuse. The bar for "worth interrupting me" is far higher for a text than for an email, and crossing it gets you the digital equivalent of a slammed door.

So the useful question isn't "email or SMS?" It's "what does each one deserve?"

• Email is for substance and volume. The story, the newsletter, the detailed launch, the lookbook, the things that benefit from room to breathe and images to show. It's also where the bulk of your sending should live, because it's the channel built for it.
• SMS is for urgency and brevity. The things that are genuinely time-sensitive or genuinely useful in the moment: the order shipped, the back-in-stock alert they asked for, the cart reminder, the flash sale ending tonight. Short, timely, and rare.

The word that should govern your SMS program is restraint. Because every text costs you money to send and costs the customer a sliver of patience, the channel punishes overuse far faster than email does. A brand that texts twice a week with "just a reminder" trains people to opt out. A brand that texts only when it genuinely matters earns the rare privilege of a channel people actually read.

Use email generously and SMS sparingly, and let each do the job it's actually good at. The moment you start sending the same blast to both, you've misunderstood what makes the text worth having.

Until next week,

Ani