WhatsApp & Email & SMS, Marketing & Advertising News, ET BrandEquity

Most smartphone users spend an average of about 2 to 3 hours a day using their device. Even if a user does not spend a lot of time on his mobile phone, he ends up checking it many times a day. This is why mobile phones are a great place for marketers to focus their performance marketing efforts.

If you are a digital marketer looking to reach your audience, you can do so through three main mediums: SMS marketing, WhatsApp marketing, and email marketing. The meeting point for all three is the user's smartphone, but all three mediums differ in reach, reception, and overall effectiveness.

The three media play different roles in a marketer's strategy. Email is an inexpensive form of reaching a large audience. SMS marketing is used to inform users about sales and offers, and WhatsApp is the most effective of his three mediums, using multimedia formats to interact directly with users.

Ankit Khirwal of Upgrad agrees that WhatsApp is a more expensive medium in terms of ROI. It is approximately 75% more expensive to send a single WhatsApp marketing message. As opposed to sending a single email. “But regardless of this surface-level effectiveness, the ROI of email marketing efforts is better than WhatsApp because it is so expensive to send a WhatsApp text in the first place. It is also about 13-14 times cheaper, making it inferior to WhatsApp both in terms of effectiveness and ROI,” says Khirwal.

The types of messages sent by each medium are also different. SMS includes text-based communications as well as discount codes and web links. Email and WhatsApp marketing messages can include photos, GIFs, text, games, and more. Khirwal said the diversity and richness of communication tends to influence its effectiveness.

You should also consider where these promotional messages will reach. For emails – The majority of Gmail users find that their emails are automatically categorized under the Promotions tab (if they contain marketing messages). For SMS – Most smartphone manufacturers now distinguish between transactional SMS, promotional SMS, and text messages from known senders. According to industry estimates, SMS are five times less likely to be read compared to his WhatsApp messages.

Only when using WhatsApp, promotional messages will arrive in your main inbox along with your personal and work text conversations. This makes it much more likely that you will open his WhatsApp text from the company. However, brand managers should be wary of spam. Failure to do so may result in your account being banned from the meta.

UpGrad's Khirwal reveals that SMS charges can range between 9 paisa to 14 paisa depending on the size of the campaign. WhatsApp charges never fall below 70 paisa regardless of size. That's because that's the base price that Meta charges. The effectiveness of SMS is probably 1/10th of the investment, whereas for WhatsApp it's about 1/7th of the investment. Khirwal also said that WhatsApp happens to have the highest click-through rate among all three mediums, generating 1.3x more profit for the company in terms of conversions (compared to the other two mediums). adds.

“Sometimes your goal is awareness, sometimes it's click-through rate. WhatsApp can be leveraged depending on what you're trying to achieve,” says Kunal Dubey, Chief Marketing Officer at Cleartrip. says. Dubey ranks WhatsApp his number one, email his second, and SMS last in terms of effectiveness and his ROI metrics. For email marketing efforts – open rates range from 5 to 15%. For some niche companies and sectors, open rates can be up to 20%. Subhendu Pattnaik, Principal Analyst at Forrester, explains that while WhatsApp engagement continues to grow, email remains the leader among the three media. He says one of the ways SMS differs from the other two is Internet access.

“The biggest challenge with email marketing is clutter. Whatsapp has a high response rate and has features for broadcasting (like group emails), but (unlike email) recipients don't know if they're a member of a broadcast group. “You can’t know if it’s true or not,” he says.

SMS can prompt customers to take action without the need for the internet. Dubey believes that SMS can be even more effective than SMS or his WhatsApp marketing if it provides the right nudge to the user at the right time. This is what Cleartrip leveraged in his Tatkal campaign last year.

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Khirwal and Dubey agreed that SMS marketing works if an e-commerce company is running paid promotions or trying to draw attention to a sale/offer. Dubey also said that WhatsApp is effective in terms of stickiness and brand reinvigoration.

Akash Srivastava, head of growth marketing at Livspace, said WhatsApp is the standout medium among the three because it has high read rates, high delivery rates, and is conversational in nature.

Srivastava reports that Livspace has a 30-35% response rate on WhatsApp marketing and 20% leads are generated there. The brand can leverage WhatsApp in this way due to its high open rates. In comparison, email open rates are 15-20% and engagement rates are 4-5%. Livspace’s engagement rate on WhatsApp marketing is around 20%. He added that in Tier II and III cities, people prefer to interact with brands on WhatsApp than visit websites.

“If your email CTR is 1%, SMS will be in that 30% range. WhatsApp will give you 1.7-1.8% of that. However, SMS is the cheapest medium. SMS Marketing and WhatsApp In marketing, there is a five-fold difference in costs and a six-fold difference in click-through rates,” says Dubey.

SMS delivery rates are low at 45-50%, leaving marketers wondering how many people actually read SMS. Livspace's Srivastava says that eventually he feels that WhatsApp will take over SMS as a marketing medium.

Pattnaik and Dubey agree on one thing. That is, the impact is caused by the message itself, not the medium in which it is delivered. Pattnaik said that to stand out as a differentiated brand, it is important for companies to think beyond their products and services and focus on proactively solving customer problems. I am.

Vakul Agarwal, vice president of growth, says Push Notifications, beyond SMS, WhatsApp and email, is working well for brands as it is the fourth medium.

In addition to having no character limit, Agarwal points out that notification spaces allow brand managers to be creative and grab customers' attention.

In the case of Licious, the email sender's role is to introduce the product catalog and encourage the consumer to order again. Brands typically track email open rates (around 20%) to understand whether consumers are viewing their content.

Agarwal's performance marketing strategy focuses 50% of its efforts on push notifications and the remaining 50% on WhatsApp, email, and SMS marketing. To ensure that your marketing efforts are not intrusive, communications are not sent too late at night or early in the morning. SMS marketing communications remain limited because they generally have low click-through rates and are often never opened by recipients.