SMS Open Rate Explained: How To Improve SMS Open Rate

Adding brand text messages to your marketing strategy can be a great way to foster customer engagement. However, even the most thoughtful SMS marketing strategy only works if people open your text messages. 

An SMS open rate measures how many recipients open your text messages after they’re delivered. For businesses running SMS campaigns, it’s an essential metric to measure.

This guide covers what this key metric means, what affects your SMS open rate, and tips to improve your SMS campaign performance.

What is a good SMS open rate?

An SMS open rate is the percentage of delivered messages that recipients open, calculated by dividing the number of opens by the number of successful deliveries and multiplying by 100. It’s widely reported that transactional SMS messages can see a 98% open rate, but according to Omnisend, a more realistic open rate for promotional SMS messages hovers between 90% and 98%. 

To put this number into context, the average open rate for emails is 28.6%, according to a survey by Moengage. That’s across all email types, including non-personalized and personalized behavior-based emails, which tend to get open rates as high as 42.36%. 

A store sending 10,000 SMS messages could expect to see 9,000 to 9,800 of them opened. The same store sending an email to 10,000 recipients could expect anywhere from 2,800 to 4,200 opens. The relatively high open rate for SMS supports a marketing strategy that combines text message marketing with other marketing channels, like email and social media.

Ways to improve your SMS open rate

• Maintain SMS list quality
• Segment your audience
• Send personalized content
• Time your messages strategically
• Use automation tools

A rate below 90% in your SMS campaigns can indicate more than one issue. Factors contributing to lower open rates include messaging that doesn’t feel relevant to your audience, sending to invalid phone numbers, and sending at the wrong time. Here are five ways to improve your SMS open rate.

Maintain SMS list quality

A bloated SMS list hurts your open rate. Every inactive or unengaged number in your list pulls your open rate down, making campaign performance look worse than it is, even if your real, engaged subscribers are opening texts.

Ensure that everyone on your list is there because they’ve consented. Sending text messages without permission is against US law. Honor anyone’s request to opt out of your SMS texts by immediately removing them from your list. From there, remove contacts who consistently don’t open your texts and numbers that bounce back as invalid. A well-maintained, smaller list of engaged subscribers is better poised to outperform a large list of indifferent ones. 

Segment your audience

Sending the same message to your entire target audience risks reducing relevance for most of them. A subscriber who bought running shoes three months ago and hasn’t engaged since responds differently to a back-in-stock alert than a first-time buyer who wants to learn more about relevant products. 

Use customer data to deliver personalized messages based on customer segments defined by factors like purchase history, order frequency, and browsing behavior. Detailed analytics from SMS campaign management software can provide open rate and conversion data to help refine future campaigns. For example, you might find that one message performs better with one audience over another, so you double down with the audience it’s working with and try a new tactic for the other. 

To start, you could create segments based on: 

• First-time buyers vs. returning customers

• High-value vs. occasional buyers

• Product category preferences

• Shopping frequency

Send personalized content

Once you have your audience organized into meaningful groups, the next step is using the customer data within those segments to make each message feel like it was written for one person rather than a list. For example, you could use purchase history to trigger the right message to the right customer. Someone who bought a skin care serum 60 days ago is a natural candidate for a replenishment reminder, made even more relevant by adding details like their name and skin profile. A subscriber who clicked a product link but didn’t convert is a candidate for a follow-up with a special discount just for them.

Personalization moves the needle beyond someone simply opening your text. It can motivate them to keep going in the purchasing journey. In fact, Attentive’s State of Personalized Marketing report found that the top three factors that influence continued shopping with a brand are knowing a customer’s preferences, making relevant product suggestions, and remembering past interactions. 

Magnolia Bakery’s senior marketing manager, Adam Davis, adds that text messages should be differentiated from the messages customers receive via other channels. “Email has to be extremely contextually relevant, and SMS has to properly complement the emails,” Adam says on Shopify Masters. “They can’t be the exact same thing because most of our email audience is also on our SMS audience. So you don’t want to send the same email and SMS on the same day, because it’s just a waste of our marketing messaging.”

Time your messages strategically

Timing affects how many recipients open your SMS messages before they scroll past them. After analyzing more than 25 billion messages, Attentive found 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays to be the best for SMS marketing. Keep in mind the time zones across your list. For example, a 2 p.m. send on the East Coast lands at 11 a.m. for customers on the West Coast, which changes the context. For time-sensitive messages like flash sales or limited-time offers, that gap matters, and you’ll need to be sure customers in different time zones have the same amount of access to an offer you text.

What works best for your SMS marketing campaigns may not match the standard, though. Test send times for at least two business cycles to let time-of-day variables settle before drawing conclusions. Split your list and send the same message at two different times, then compare open rates across segments. Repeat across a substantial amount of time, like two weeks, before locking in a send window.

Use automation tools

Sending text messages manually and digging through data would simply be too time-consuming. SMS marketing automation tools handle the timing, triggering, and sequencing so messages go out based on customer behavior rather than your availability to send them. 

This removes two mistakes that can impact open rates: sending at the wrong time and sending to the wrong people. Triggered SMS messages go out when a customer takes an action, which means they arrive in context rather than at random. A back-in-stock alert sent the moment inventory returns not only gets someone to open the message, but it can motivate them to convert.

Here are some SMS automation platforms that integrate with Shopify and track your open rate:

• Klaviyo. Send SMS marketing messages to audience segments using triggers that draw on both historical and real-time customer data. Klaviyo also handles email, making it a good fit if you’re running both marketing channels from one platform.

• Mailchimp. Mailchimp combines SMS and email marketing automation in a single dashboard with tracking reports that cover both open and click-through rates. 

• Postscript. Postscript helps you build automated and personalized SMS campaigns, focusing on making texts feel conversational and customized. 

• Yotpo. Yotpo helps you build your email list with forms and pop-ups, segment customers, and track key metrics with more than 12 dashboards.

These platforms also analyze your data beyond open rates, so you can have clear insights into engagement, how texts impact revenue, and results from strategies like A/B testing.

If you’re struggling to craft the content of your texts, these tools can help there as well, with templates designed to engage your recipients. They can be integrated with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, so all of your SMS data lives in one place.