Email marketing in 2024: time to leave the stone age

The Honest Take on Email Marketing

Let’s be clear about something: email marketing is not dead. Email can still be one of the more impactful marketing vehicles when set up correctly and pointed at the right audience. Automated flows like abandoned cart emails and post-purchase sequences have been shown to increase ROI across virtually every industry. Years of list-building and campaign infrastructure represent real business value that no one should casually discard.

But is it time to think beyond email — either as a supplement or as a path to an entirely new channel? That’s a different question. And the data makes it a harder one to dismiss.

SMS open rates run between 80% and 98% depending on the study. Gartner puts the ceiling at 98%; a Shift Communications survey found that 82% of people open every text they receive. Email open rates sit at roughly 20% industry-wide , or up to 36–40% for well-maintained lists (Mailchimp, Klaviyo). That’s a 2.5× to 4.5× difference in who actually sees your message.

The answer isn’t to scrap years of email campaign work and go all-in on SMS. The answer is to use each channel for what it does best — and to build a strategy that runs them together.

Email vs SMS: Head-to-Head Numbers

Here’s what the research actually shows across every key performance metric. Sources cited inline — these are not TextingOnly estimates.

Use Each Channel for What It Does Best

The smartest marketing stacks in 2026 don’t choose between email and SMS — they deploy each channel where it wins. SMS isn’t a replacement for email. It’s the layer that handles immediacy, engagement, and conversion while email handles depth, content, and nurture.

SMS Automation Has Caught Up

One of email’s long-held advantages over SMS was automation sophistication. That gap has closed. TextingOnly’s inbound SMS automations now match email automation depth — operating in a channel with 4–5× higher engagement rates.

The difference isn’t capability — it’s the channel those automations run in. SMS automations fire into a channel that customers check within 3 minutes. Email automations fire into a channel that averages 90+ minutes to first open. The automation logic is comparable. The medium changes everything.

The Play: Convert Your Email List to SMS

You don’t have to build an SMS contact list from scratch. Your email list represents an audience that already knows and trusts your brand. TextingOnly’s convert-email-to-SMS workflow turns that existing asset into a high-value opted-in SMS list — reaching the same people on both channels simultaneously.

The result: your existing email investment doesn’t get replaced. It gets amplified. The same subscriber who opens your emails occasionally now also receives your time-sensitive texts — in a channel where 90% of messages are read within three minutes.

What SMS Automation Looks Like in Practice

TextingOnly’s SMS automation platform gives marketers the same campaign sophistication as leading email tools — deployed into a channel with fundamentally higher engagement. Here’s what’s available through the TextingOnly platform :

When a customer texts in, OTTO automatically routes them through a structured ITR menu — qualifying intent, capturing data, and routing to the right team member. No human required for the initial engagement.

Outbound campaigns with automated response handling. When a contact replies “Yes,” the automation fires instantly — confirming next steps, notifying the sales team, and logging the interaction end-to-end.

Mass text campaigns with dynamic keyword personalization — every message feels 1-to-1 at scale. Send thousands of personalized messages and capture structured replies from every response.

Add SMS to Your Marketing Stack

TextingOnly works alongside your existing email campaigns — converting subscribers, running parallel outreach, and handling every response automatically. Same audience. Four times the engagement.

Email marketing isn’t dying — it’s just declining toward a baseline. SMS is the channel doing the work email used to do. The businesses that haven’t added it yet are competing with one hand tied behind their back.