No matter what industry you operate in, communication will make up the core of your operations. Whether you’re talking to superiors, reports, co-workers, clients, stakeholders, partners, or prospects, it’s vital to have effective communication to make sure everyone is informed, connected, and working together.
But that’s obvious. What’s not obvious is which channels of communication to use and which to prioritize. These include phone calls, mail, social media, video calls, and more, but a debate has been raging between two major avenues of communication: email vs text.
Each has its strengths and weaknesses as well as times and situations where one or the other is more or less appropriate. Let’s dive into how each one can fit into your business and which you should be leveraging more often than the other.
Accessibility and Immediacy
In the department of convenience, text clearly comes out on top. Emails can obviously be sent to phones just like texts can, but people often have multiple email addresses and they may not have notifications enabled for the address you’re contacting. Plus, emails can sometimes take longer to reach their destination and may just end up in spam or junk folders, meaning the recipient may never get it.
Texts, on the other hand, are immediate and can’t get sent to spam. If you send someone a text, they are far more likely to get a notification and read it than if you sent an email. This reliable immediacy and accessibility can be vital for multiple potential business scenarios such as two-factor authentication, order or service updates, promotions, and offers.
Being able to get that information into the hands of your recipient as soon as possible can be the difference between a well-run business operation and one that falls apart at the seams.
Formality and Documentation
Email has a long and storied history in business communications. There is a reason why it’s still so heavily used despite the advent of texting. One of the main advantages of email is its formal nature. Emails can have things like signatures and official emblems or seals, giving them a much more professional feel than text.
Anyone who has tried to look for a text from a year ago can sympathize with the difficulty of message documentation. Emails can also be quickly organized, sorted, and filtered, making it easy to find a specific message regardless of how long it’s been since you received it. Entire message threads are included, allowing you to have a paper trail for decisions made, orders placed, services performed, and individuals responsible.
Lastly, email is a great avenue for longer and more complex messages. Including images, videos, and most of all, attachments is email’s top strength. Have 500 words and a PDF to send to someone? Text isn’t going to cut it.
Open and Response Rates
So far in the discussion between email vs text, we’ve discussed things like immediacy and formality, but all of that isn’t worth much if the recipient never actually reads the message. Email campaigns are notorious for having low open rates, meaning the vast majority of the individuals who receive your email will delete it after hardly even reading the subject line.
Texting, on the other hand, is a different story. Since you likely receive multiple texts every day, it should be no surprise that texts have an average open rate of 98 percent. People will look at texts just through the compulsory need to remove the new text notification on their phones. This also translates to much higher response rates, giving you many more opportunities to communicate and interact with clients, customers, and prospects. For this reason alone, texting wins out over email in many scenarios.
Email vs Text: How RyText Can Help
Despite the many advantages that text has in the email vs text debate, many businesses are still hesitant to incorporate this powerful tool into their arsenal. It could be due to the stigma around texting or just because the organization doesn’t have the systems in place to take advantage of it.
That’s where RyText comes in. Our cloud-based SMS solutions are intuitive, easy to use, and easy to integrate into existing communication systems. Stand above the competition with your messaging and start getting your message out there with SMS solutions. Contact us today to get started and try a live demo!
