In a head-to-head comparison of the two channels, SMS marketing wins on speed and deliverability: 82% of recipients check a text message within five minutes of receiving it, and the message never passes through spam filters. Email marketing keeps the advantage wherever content volume and a long-term customer relationship matter most.
The advantage of the text message comes from three independent factors: the recipient's reaction time, the strength of the purchase impulse, and the absence of technical intermediaries between the sender and the phone screen.
A text message reaches the recipient instantly. According to a SimpleTexting consumer study, 82% of people check a new SMS notification within five minutes, and nearly one third do so within 60 seconds.
No other marketing communication channel delivers that kind of pace. An email lands in the inbox, where it competes with dozens of other messages and waits for the moment the customer decides to open it.
The short message format acts as a trigger for action. A report by Klaviyo and Recharge shows that 72% of respondents made a purchase after receiving a message from a brand, and in Europe that share reaches 74%.
The effect on purchase timing is even more interesting. Among people who bought something under the influence of a text message in the past year, 65% had planned that purchase for the nearer or more distant future – and made it earlier than intended precisely because of a promotional SMS.
This makes SMS campaigns the first-choice tool wherever an offer has a limited lifespan: sales, discount codes, or back-in-stock alerts.
Telecom infrastructure does not categorise or block messages sent from official channels. Email campaigns, by contrast, have to reckon with spam and promotions folders, which forces deliverability testing before every larger send.
The receiving conditions differ too. Reading an SMS only requires mobile network coverage, whereas email needs an active internet connection. Recipients themselves value this – in the study „SMS Communication in Poland”, 73.6% of respondents named coverage and the lack of an internet connection requirement as an advantage of text messages, and 77.1% appreciated the delivery speed.
Both channels remain inexpensive – the unit cost starts at a few grosz per message, with email being the slightly cheaper format.
A fair assessment of both channels requires pointing out the areas where email performs better. Knowing them makes it possible to design a division of roles instead of giving up one of the tools.
Email performs well in terms of conversion measured per channel. Benchmarks from the agency Coalition Technologies indicate an average of 2.8% in the B2C sector and 2.4% in B2B, although real results depend on the industry – other studies report a range of 2–5% for B2C and 0.8–3% for B2B.
The success of an email campaign is decided first by the subject line, however. It determines whether the recipient opens the message at all – content the whole team worked on stays irrelevant if the subject fails to convince them in a fraction of a second.
Email also remains the only one of the two channels that can carry extensive content: graphics, multiple links, brand storytelling, or educational materials. The recipient can return to such a message, sort it, and archive it.
| Criterion | SMS marketing | Email marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Time to read | 82% within 5 minutes | depends on recipient habits |
| Conversion | strong purchase impulse | 2.8% B2C / 2.4% B2B |
| Filters and blocks | none | risk of spam and promotions tab |
| Technical requirements | mobile network coverage | internet connection |
| Message capacity | 160 characters (70 with Polish characters) | practically unlimited |
| Role in the campaign | impulse, urgent notifications | education, relationship building |
The two channels are not competitors. They differ in the moment when they work best, which is why campaigns combining email and SMS deliver more than the sum of separate sends.
Platform data confirms this. Subscribers receiving both SMS and email are twice as likely to buy as people signed up for SMS only, and 57% of buyers are more willing to consider an offer from a brand they have seen in several places at once.
The condition, however, is that the messages must not duplicate each other. 73% of recipients prefer the next message to add something new instead of repeating the same thing.
Expectations around message relevance are rising too – 74% of consumers expect a more personalised shopping experience from brands. In text messages, the most commonly used personalisation tactic remains addressing the recipient by first name.
The division of roles looks as follows:
Separating the use cases protects against the most expensive mistake – duplicating the same message in two places.
SMS messages work well for:
Email campaigns are better suited to:
Effective campaigns are built on a workflow in which the system reacts to customer behaviour rather than to the calendar. The scenarios below include specific time delays ready to implement in automated SMS sending.
The process starts with a reminder email sent an hour after the visitor leaves the site. If the recipient does not click the link, after 48 hours the system generates an SMS with an additional discount – the moment when a low email click-through rate turns into real conversion.
A day before the official start, an SMS goes out only to the VIP segment, for example people with at least three recent purchases. On launch day the wider base receives a detailed email, while subscribers who clicked the SMS are excluded from that send and only get a reminder two days later.
An email with a gift goes out a week before the customer's birthday. If the coupon is not redeemed, a reminder in the form of a short text message is sent the day before the promotion ends.
Immediately after the transaction the customer receives an email with the order summary. If they do not open it within 12 hours, the system sends the most important details by SMS. A separate message goes out at the moment the parcel is physically dispatched.
After 60 days without any activity, email makes the first attempt to win the recipient back. No open triggers a retry by SMS after a further 72 hours.
Building anticipation starts 3 to 5 days before the sale begins with a series of emails. On the opening day, an SMS triggers the purchase impulse.
Each of the cases above relies on the same sequence:
If a customer receives an SMS promoting a product they have just bought after clicking through a newsletter, they will see it as pushiness on the brand's part. Avoiding that situation requires one condition: data from both channels must flow in real time into a shared CRM system.
A properly integrated platform makes it possible to automatically exclude recipients from campaigns that no longer apply to them – it will not send an SMS reminder to someone who has already redeemed the coupon from the email.
In practice this means connecting the store, the CRM system, and the SMS gateway into a single data flow, most often through SMS API or a ready-made integration with the software in use – for example Magento, Shopify, Zapier, or Bitrix24.
Contrary to popular opinion, Poles do not treat commercial messages as a nuisance. The study „SMS Communication in Poland” shows that over 82% of Poles declare a willingness to receive SMS messages with offers or promotion information – most often several times a week (30.8%) or once or twice a week (30.2%).
Attitudes towards the messages themselves confirm this. Over 83% of respondents react positively to text messages from online and brick-and-mortar stores, and the most attractive content turns out to be information about a discount or promotion (77.6%) and about order status (58.6%).
The practical conclusion for a marketer: the sending rhythm is worth setting per segment rather than by a blanket limit. The most engaged customer group will accept more frequent contact, while a base acquired in a one-off action requires caution. Night-time and early-morning sends, meanwhile, remain the most frequently reported abuse, regardless of segment.
The legal basis for sending changed recently. The Electronic Communications Law of 12 July 2024 came into force on 10 November 2024 and replaced the previous Telecommunications Law. Article 398 of the PKE took over the role of the earlier Article 172 of the Telecommunications Law and Article 10 of the Act on Providing Services by Electronic Means.
For a marketer this means one regulation instead of two, but not the removal of obligations. Consent must be voluntary, unambiguous, informed, and specific, and it must be obtained actively – for example by deliberately ticking the relevant checkbox. The specificity requirement means that separate checkboxes for email and SMS are still used in practice – general consent to a newsletter does not cover sending to a phone number.
The opt-out paths differ as well. In email, the standard is a link in the footer, while a phone subscription should end by sending a simple STOP command – just as easily and without additional barriers. We covered the details in GDPR and SMS sending.
A standard text message holds a maximum of 160 characters. Using Polish diacritics reduces that limit to 70 characters, which translates directly into the cost of sending.
Writing SMS content therefore requires an editorial decision right at the start: a shorter message in full Polish, or a longer one written without diacritics.
SMS remains the faster and more reliable channel for reaching people, and email the best medium for longer content. The greatest return on investment, however, comes from a model in which both tools work on shared data, and SMS closes what email has prepared.
Registering in the SMS-fly panel lets you launch SMS campaigns and connect them with your existing system in a few minutes.
SMS wins on speed and deliverability – 82% of recipients read a message within five minutes, and it never passes through spam filters. Email works better for longer content and long-term relationship building.
Since November 2024 the basis is Article 398 of the Electronic Communications Law. Consent must be specific, which is why separate checkboxes are used in practice – consent to a newsletter does not authorise sending to a phone number.
Over 82% of Poles want to receive commercial messages, most often several times a week or once to twice a week. Frequency is worth matching to the segment, avoiding night-time sends.
Yes. Subscribers receiving both types of message are twice as likely to buy as people signed up for SMS only, provided the messages do not duplicate each other.
160 characters as standard. Adding Polish diacritics drops the limit to 70 characters in a single message.