SMS Open Rates vs Email: The Real Numbers

Search for SMS marketing statistics and one figure comes up constantly: a 98% open rate, against roughly 20% for email. Both numbers are widely repeated across the industry, and both deserve a bit of scepticism about what they're actually measuring before being used to justify a channel switch.

Why the comparison is slippery

Email open rates are measured with a tracking pixel that has to actually load - many modern email clients block that by default, or pre-fetch images in a way that inflates the count. So the commonly cited ~20% email figure is already a rough, imperfect proxy, not a precise measurement. SMS doesn't have an equivalent open-tracking mechanism at all in most platforms - "98% open rate" is really shorthand for "the overwhelming majority of text messages get looked at," based on general research into phone usage habits, not a pixel-level count per campaign.

What's actually reliable: delivery

The number a bulk SMS platform can measure precisely is delivery - whether the message reached the handset - not whether a human looked at the screen afterwards. SimpliSend reports sent, delivered, or failed for every message, which is a genuinely accurate, per-message metric. That's a smaller claim than "open rate," but it's one you can actually trust and act on: a failed delivery means a bad number or a network issue, and it's worth cleaning that contact from the list.

The metric that matters more than either

For a marketing campaign, response or conversion rate - how many recipients actually clicked a link, showed up, replied, or made a purchase - tells you far more than any open-rate estimate. It's directly measurable (a unique tracked link, a redeemed code, a reply count) and it's the number tied to actual business outcome, not just attention.

A more honest way to compare channels

• Use delivery rate, not "open rate," as the SMS baseline metric
• Track conversion (clicks, replies, redemptions) as the real success measure
• Compare SMS and email on speed of response, not just eventual reach
• Remember that a smaller, well-targeted SMS list often converts better than a big email blast

The honest summary is that SMS gets seen faster and more reliably than email, on essentially every phone in the country - that much is well established. Whether that translates into more sales or bookings depends on the message and the offer, not the channel alone. Use the delivery and response numbers from your own campaigns rather than a headline statistic from someone else's.