The key to buyer loyalty? Email and SMS

Email is usually one of the first channels companies use to communicate with their customers. It’s a reliable, effective, and secure way to share both transactional and marketing messages. But the average person only checks their personal email two hours a daywhich means they may miss out on your brand’s time sensitive offers and messages. When it comes to communicating these updates in real time, consider an alternative: SMS.

Actually, 90% of all SMS are read within 3 secondsso your brand can bypass crowded email inboxes and provide real-time communications for your customers that they actually read. That’s not to say that your email and SMS campaigns can’t work together to increase user engagement. We believe there is a time and place where email, SMS and both channels work together!

With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the release of our newly updated guide. Address your customers with SMS and email in 2021!

Building on last year’s guide, we’ve included helpful email and SMS best practices, common mistakes to avoid, and examples of how top brands are using these two channels to attract customers. Wondering what’s new in this year’s edition? It contains detailed information on:

• What A2P 10DLC is and what it means for companies to send text messages
• New use cases for email and SMS
• Best Practices and Common Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid
• How to use email and SMS together to keep your users engaged
• And more!

The report also includes practical examples of how top brands use email and SMS together to target their customers. One of these brands is vacation rental Airbnb.

How Airbnb uses email and SMS to engage hosts

When hosts receive a reservation request through Airbnb, you only have 32 hours to accept or decline the request. While Airbnb emails the host immediately after a guest makes a rental request, the company missed potential reservations every time the host didn’t see an email in time and a request timed out.

The company quickly realized that their hosts were on their way. They don’t always sit at their computers and can quickly reply to emails. To provide a better user experience, Airbnb turned to text messaging. If a host does not immediately respond to a booking request, they will also receive an automated SMS message with the guest’s information, the desired date and the booking price. Hosts can then simply accept or decline the reservation with a short text reply.

Since the introduction of SMS reservation notifications, Airbnb has increased the number of successful bookings and has helped improve the experience for potential guests who now don’t have to wait that long to get feedback on a reservation.

Use email and SMS together in 2021

Whether you want to send alerts, notifications, or re-engagement notices to your audience, two channels can often be better than one. Although there is a time and place for both e-mail and SMS, these two channels do not have to operate in silos. Actually, they shouldn’t.

Our updated guide, Address your customers with SMS and email in 2021, shares everything you need to get started with texting for the first time or make sure to get the most out of your existing texting strategy. Grab your copy of the report now and start creating email and SMS strategies that work together!