Email marketing · SMS
SMS costs more per message, needs stricter consent and wears out faster. Here is how I would split the work between the two channels.
Texts cost roughly a cent each
Texting needs written consent first
Weekly promo texts drive opt-outs
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The most common mistake I see with SMS marketing is a business that treats it like a faster email. It sends the same weekly promotion by text, watches the first send do rather well, and then watches the unsubscribes pile up over the next two months. SMS and email do different jobs. Text is for things that are time-sensitive and short: an appointment tomorrow, an order that has shipped, a flash sale that ends tonight, a table that just opened up. Email is for everything that can wait an hour and benefits from more than 160 characters: newsletters, product launches, guides, follow-ups, the long slow work of staying in touch.
So for most small businesses the honest answer to “SMS or email?” is email as the workhorse and SMS as a small, carefully guarded second channel. The reasons are cost, consent and the simple fact that a text interrupts someone in a way an email does not.
Email is cheap to send because you mostly pay for the platform, not the message. Once you are on a plan that covers your list size, the cost of one more email is close to nothing. Texts are billed per message, plus carrier fees, plus registration.
Worked example. As of October 2026, Twilio’s US price list shows $0.0083 per outbound SMS segment, with carrier fees on top that depend on the recipient’s carrier (AT&T charges $0.0035 per outbound text, T-Mobile $0.0045). Call it about 1.2 to 1.3 cents a text. Send one text to 5,000 subscribers and you have spent roughly $60 to $65. Do that weekly and it is somewhere between $3,000 and $3,300 a year in message costs alone, before the texting platform’s own fee and the one-off registration that US carriers require for business texting from ordinary 10-digit numbers (known as 10DLC). Marketing platforms such as Klaviyo bundle these costs differently, and prices vary, but the shape is the same.
Two things quietly double that bill. A standard text segment holds 160 characters; go over and you pay for two segments. And a single emoji switches the whole message to a different character set where a segment holds only 70 characters, so a cheerful 90-character text with a smiley face costs twice as much as the same text without it. Rather a lot of money has been spent on small yellow faces.
This is general information, not legal advice, and texting law is an area where you want a lawyer’s opinion before you launch. That said, the broad difference is easy to state.
Commercial email in the US runs on an opt-out model. The CAN-SPAM Act does not require permission before you send, but it does require honest sender details and subject lines, a physical postal address, a working unsubscribe, and that you honor opt-outs within 10 business days. (Good practice, and the big inbox providers, push you toward permission anyway, but the law itself is opt-out.)
Marketing texts are opt-in, and strictly so. Under the FCC’s rules implementing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, automated marketing texts generally need the recipient’s prior express written consent, which in practice means a clear checkbox or keyword sign-up that says what they are agreeing to. Since April 2025 the FCC has also required that people be able to revoke consent by any reasonable means, with replies like STOP, QUIT, END, CANCEL or UNSUBSCRIBE treated as automatic opt-outs, honored within 10 business days. Some states add rules of their own on top. The penalties are per message, which is why TCPA lawsuits are as common as they are. Our guide to SMS marketing compliance covers the details.
The practical consequence: you can’t take your email list and start texting it. You need a separate, documented opt-in for SMS.
A text is read almost immediately, which is its whole appeal. The catch is that it is read immediately because it lands among messages from people’s children and their doctor. A discount code at 2:15 on a Tuesday afternoon, every Tuesday, is not welcome there. People forgive a promotional email they ignore; they do not forgive a phone buzzing for something that could have waited. And unsubscribing from SMS is a single word typed back, so they do.
My rule of thumb, for what it’s worth: if the message would be just as useful tomorrow morning, it belongs in email. If it would be useless tomorrow morning, it may earn a text.
The combination works best when each channel has a clear job and the customer knows what to expect from each. A reasonable split for a small business looks like this:
Tell people at sign-up how often you will text (once or twice a month is a defensible promise for most businesses) and keep the promise. Then watch the SMS opt-out rate per send. If it climbs, you are texting too often or texting things that belong in email.
Not sure where to start? Book a free 30-minute call and we’ll look at what you send today, by email and by text, and tell you what we’d change first. No obligation. Book your call.
If you are still building the email side, it is usually the better first investment; our notes on building an email list and on email deliverability are a good place to begin. We set up and run both channels on MailChimp, Klaviyo and HubSpot as part of our email marketing work.
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For getting a short, urgent message read quickly, yes. For building a relationship over months, no. Texts get read fast but wear out fast, and you can say far less in them. Most small businesses get more out of a good email program with a small amount of SMS added on top.
Having a number is not the same as having consent to send marketing texts. Under the TCPA rules you generally need prior express written consent for automated marketing texts. Transactional messages are treated differently, but check with counsel before you assume a message qualifies.
Less often than you think. Once or twice a month is a sensible ceiling for most, and say so at sign-up. Appointment reminders and order updates don’t count against that, because people want them.
They can. An emoji switches the message to an encoding where each segment holds 70 characters instead of 160, so a message that would have fit in one segment may be billed as two or three.
