How do customers want you to reach them? It depends on when you ask them. But we do know a few things about what customers almost always prefer: 76% of customers prefer speed over resolution, and 61% prefer convenience.

That means you need a system in place for replying to customers as you market to them, whether that comes through texting or emailing. But SMS and email can be leveraged together as well. They’re not only the most common ways to interact with customers, but they’re capable tools for managing your marketing campaigns—if you know how to use them properly.

The pros and cons of texting

Texting is immediate, interactive, and ubiquitous. So why can’t every marketer figure out how to market with texting effectively? Knowing how to handle text marketing means understanding its capabilities as well as its limits.

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Cons:

The pros and cons of emailing

Email marketing is one of the most successful ways to get people to hear your message. It allows for creativity, fun, and genuine value created for the customer. But it also has some flaws that are worth noting if you’re going to create a worthwhile marketing campaign:

Pros:

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How to leverage texting and email together in your marketing campaigns

Put together, email and text messaging can be more than the sum of their parts. Email can help fill in the blanks of your small text messages, and texts can provide the interactivity you don’t get from sending out mass emails. And since everyone’s on their phone more than ever, the lines are blurred. That’s why 73% of today’s companies include mobile optimization when beginning a new email campaign.

The only remaining question: how do you use these two powerful tools together to create effective marketing campaigns?

Integrating email and SMS marketing with your existing structure

If you’ve never done it before, taking on email and SMS marketing campaigns can seem like a lot. But try to think of these strategies as simple ways to handle customer outreach. Done effectively, they can fit neatly into your existing structure.

For example, Grasshopper Connect can help you respond to customers by creating a singular inbox for all of your marketing texting and emailing. You won’t have to worry about these marketing campaigns continually adding new channels you’ll have to check every day. They’ll simply fit into your regular inbox, ensuring that you can contact each customer with the speed they require. With 76% of customers preferring speed over resolution, being in touch with customers is more important than ever.

Done effectively, you can create a unified messaging plan that will handle your outreach without overwhelming you when hundreds of new customers come texting, emailing, or calling. It will allow you to build SMS and email campaigns that don’t interfere with your usual outreach strategies, giving you the capacity to establish rapport with customers, build trust, and easily search through your business contacts in one interface.