Commentary

Is Texting Tops? Study Claims It Beats Email

Email is about to land on the ash-heap of history, if you believe the study titled 2019 Mobile Usage Report: How Consumers Are Really Texting, from EZTexting.

The paper claims that text messages are 134% more likely to be read than emails, and that texting achieves six times the engagement levels of email. 

The latter is based on the company’s internal metrics, which show the typical click-through rate on text blasts is 24.4%, whereas “industry standards” indicate that the click-through for email is 3.42%.

What’s more, “emails will likely languish in an inbox for over an hour, with only 23% read within one hour of being received,” it proclaims.

Wait a minute. As you can tell from it name, EZTexting is in the texting business — it offers an SMS marketing platform.

We’re not suggesting the results are skewed. But some of these findings seem based more on outside sources and internal opinions than on original scientific research.  

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The company says it polled 1,039 people in a paid SurveyMonkey sample. It found that 50% of users respond to a text within three minutes. Another 30% answer in 10 minutes, 10% in under 30 minutes and 10% in less than an hour.

Among age groups, 68% of the 18- to-29-year-old cohort check their phones at least five times per hour. So do 60% of people ages 30-44, 50% of the 45-60 set, and 27% of those in the 60+ category.

And, of those polled, 55% send messages via Native Messenger on their mobile device, 20% on Facebook Messenger,9% on WhatsApp, 5% on Instagram Direct Messaging, 2% on Viber, 1% on Skype and 8% on “other.”

All this is very informative. But the research fails to make an apples-to-apple comparison between text and email. 

Are those texts that are almost instantly opened marketing messages? If not, these guys have no business comparing these turnaround rates with those of marketing emails. 

Not that every reference to email is negative. The reports notes that “a follow-up text after sending a marketing email can increase open rates by 30%.” 

It continues, though, that people check at emails “at fewer intervals throughout the day than they previously did.” And it states that “most email service providers stack their interfaces with ads” without providing any sourcing whatsoever.

 

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