How to integrate email and SMS for maximum engagement

This article was paid for by Intuit Mailchimp.

Email and text messaging are both effective, affordable marketing tools for small businesses. Paired together, they can create unstoppable marketing campaigns.

Short message service, or SMS, gives businesses a direct line to potential customers' phones — an incredibly valuable channel that's easier to tap into than you might think.

Even so, SMS is just one piece of the puzzle — A holistic approach is the best practice for a modern marketing strategy. Using email to nurture and inform contacts while layering in time-sensitive text messages can maximize engagement and conversions.

Here are five tips that can help you develop a marketing strategy that incorporates both email and SMS. 

It might sound obvious, but to coordinate messaging across channels in an integrated marketing strategy, you’ll need a single repository that includes both email addresses and phone numbers. This might require merging existing contact lists and cleaning them up to avoid duplication.

If you're starting fresh, build up your list more quickly by partnering with other small businesses that offer complementary services — just be sure each party has permission to share user data. It’s also possible to purchase contact lists from companies like LeadsPlease and UpLead (for B2B contacts).

Simplify the process with a platform like Intuit Mailchimp: You can build out your list by syncing or uploading spreadsheets with names, email addresses and phone numbers. Mailchimp can also store other valuable contact information, like demographic, transactional and behavioral data, that can help you strategically segment and target audiences.

"Having everything in one place — customer data, SMS messaging, and segmentation — has saved us tons of time and helps us stay organized as a small business," said Brianna Membres, founder and CEO of Indianapolis-based SheEdits, which provides professional scholarship services to high school and college students.

Using software also streamlines the permissions process, ensuring you have the green light from contacts to send marketing messages, that you’re complying with government regulations and that you’ve included opt-out options for recipients.

Email and SMS are distinct platforms with their own advantages and best-use cases. Understand their unique strengths and requirements before creating an integrated marketing campaign.

As a marketing channel, email is best for in-depth messaging, like newsletters, product announcements and content that might require some review before acting. For example, a hair salon owner might send onboarding emails to new clients, a quarterly visual newsletter featuring the season's trends and messages about new services.

SMS is the go-to for time-sensitive notes, quick updates and reminders. Texts are especially effective for messages that require immediate action. For example, the hair salon might use SMS to send 24-hour appointment reminders, limited-time discount codes or requests for online reviews just after a visit.

Email and SMS have distinct use cases, but there's room for overlap (e.g., appointment reminders, flash sale notices, links to abandoned carts).

It can be tempting to paste the same content onto both channels, but resist the urge. Doing so can make your customers feel like they’re being spammed, and as a result, they may rush to hit the "unsubscribe" button.

Small businesses looking to maximize engagement from contacts should design marketing campaigns that integrate the two channels in complementary ways. Use email to nurture and inform and SMS as a call to action.

At SheEdits, the scholarship services business, Membres engages potential customers year-round through workshops, then converts attendees into subscribers for further coaching and support. 

"To reach [our audience], we use a combination of email, SMS, paid advertising and social media," she said. "We focus a lot on audience and targeting. We use Mailchimp as our CRM [customer relationship management], which gives us a ton of usable data about our subscribers."

While emails can keep SheEdits consistently top of mind for potential customers and current subscribers, Membres uses SMS to remind families about upcoming deadlines and workshops.

"SMS specifically has been a game-changer for us. It's a more immediate and personal way to reach our audience," Membres said. "I recently reviewed our sales data and noticed that within 15-20 minutes of sending out an SMS, we were seeing sales. Whenever we send out an SMS one hour before one of our workshops, we see a surge in sign-ups. The urgency and immediacy of text messaging really help drive attendance and engagement."

Software platforms like Mailchimp offer multichannel marketing options that make it easier to create coordinated, personalized email and text campaigns. A candle shop can target a contact with a birthday discount email, for example, then send an abandoned cart text if the customer doesn't finish checking out. 

Mailchimp also offers third-party integrations, automation and branching logic to decide which messages are delivered when and via which channel. 

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