Winback: is SMS or email cheaper per order?

When a customer goes quiet, you have two cheap ways to reach them: an email or a text. They look interchangeable. They are not. They cost different amounts, they get read at wildly different rates, and picking the wrong one for the wrong message wastes money at the edges.

Start with attention, because that is what you are really buying. A marketing text gets opened almost every time, somewhere around 98 percent, usually within minutes. An ecommerce email gets opened 15 to 25 percent of the time, spread over hours. So a text almost always gets seen. That is its whole superpower, and it is a big one for anything time sensitive.

Now the cost, because attention is not free. In the US a marketing text runs roughly 1 to 5 cents to send. An email runs a tenth of that or less. Over a big list that difference is real money. So the trade is simple to state: email is nearly free and quiet, texts are cheap but not free and almost impossible to ignore.

That is why the answer is not one or the other. Email is where you go long: the story, the details, the newsletter, the slow winback that costs almost nothing to send. Texts are where you go urgent: the back in stock, the order about to lapse, the last hours of a sale. By the numbers, brands that run both together tend to earn meaningfully more than either alone, because each does the job the other is bad at.

One rule you cannot skip, especially in the US. A text is permission you have to earn explicitly and be able to prove, and the law is strict about it. So collect the opt in cleanly, honour every stop the instant it comes, and never buy a list. Reach that you did not earn is not cheap. It is a liability wearing the costume of a bargain.