Email vs. Text Marketing: What the Numbers Say, and the Channel Nobody Has Measured Yet
Text messages get seen. Email is cheaper and pays back more per dollar. That's the short answer to "email vs. text marketing," and the numbers below back it up.
But there's a third channel most comparisons skip: the calendar. Getting your event onto someone's calendar puts it where they plan their day. Nobody has measured that channel properly yet. This post lays out what we know about email and SMS, what's actually known about calendar marketing, and how we plan to measure it.
What "effective" actually means
Before comparing channels, agree on the scoreboard. Marketers track five numbers:
- Open rate: the share of delivered messages that got opened.
- Click-through rate (CTR): the share of delivered messages where someone tapped a link.
- Conversion rate: the share of people who did the thing you wanted, like buying, booking or showing up.
- Unsubscribe rate: the share of people who opted out after a send.
- Return on spend: revenue earned for every dollar spent on the channel.
Conversion and return on spend are the ones that pay the bills. Open rate looks good on a dashboard but says little. Apple Mail and other privacy features now pre-load emails, so an "open" often means a server opened it, not a person.
Email: cheap, reliable, and quietly losing clicks
Email gets opened a lot and clicked a little. Dotdigital's 2026 benchmarks, built from over a billion campaign sends, put the Americas at a 58.8% open rate but only a 2.5% click-through rate (Dotdigital). Unique clicks and click-to-open rates both fell year over year.
Take the open rate with salt. Privacy features inflate it, which is why so many reports now lean on clicks and conversions instead.
Where email wins is cost. The most quoted number in marketing is that email returns $36 for every $1 spent (Litmus). Know where it comes from, though: it's a survey of about 2,000 marketers reporting their own returns, and it's a few years old. Email also keeps people around. The average unsubscribe rate in the Americas is just 0.12% per send.
Text messages: seen fast, clicked often, easy to wear out
SMS gets roughly nine times the clicks of email. Dotdigital puts the Americas SMS click-through rate at 22.2% (Dotdigital). Other reports land between 19% and 35% depending on the campaign (MessageFlow).
You've probably seen the "98% of texts get opened" stat. Texts have no open tracking, so that number is estimated from delivery reports, not counted. It's safe to say most delivered texts get read. The exact figure is a guess.
The tradeoffs are real:
- It costs per message. Email is close to free at scale. Every text has a price.
- It needs clear consent. In the US, marketing texts require opt-in and must respect quiet hours.
- People bail when you overdo it. The Americas SMS unsubscribe rate is 0.53% per send, more than four times email's. Most people who opt out say you texted too often.
Side by side
| Text (SMS) | Calendar | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Click-through rate | 2.5% | 22.2% | No independent benchmark |
| Unsubscribe rate per send | 0.12% | 0.53% | No independent benchmark |
| Open rate | Inflated by privacy features | Estimated, not tracked | No open; it sits on the calendar |
| Cost per message | Near zero | Pennies per text | Near zero |
| Where it lives | Inbox, next to everything else | Phone, read in minutes | The day it's happening |
Click and unsubscribe figures are Americas averages from Dotdigital.
Calendar marketing: the channel with no scoreboard
Calendar marketing means getting your events onto your customer's calendar, either one at a time with an "add to calendar" button or all at once through a calendar they subscribe to. When you add a date, move a time or cancel, it updates on their phone.
The numbers out there come almost entirely from one company selling the tools. AddEvent has published a range of results from its own customers:
- A 5% attendance lift for Achievers (AddEvent).
- Webinar attendance going from 63% to 69% for an online creator (AddEvent).
- Attendance up "more than 30%" across customers, per its Chief Growth Officer (MarTech360).
- Show rates doubling for one event organizer (AddEvent).
That's a spread from 5% to 100%. Some of these results are probably real. None of them are a benchmark. They're case studies picked by the vendor, measured different ways, with no shared definition of success.
Even AddEvent admits the hard part. In the same interview, its growth chief says it can track clicks, RSVPs and subscriptions, but the business results often live in other systems. We hit the same wall.
What we're going to measure
We're not going to claim calendar marketing beats email or text. We don't know yet, and neither does anyone else. So we're going to measure it in the open.
SoKal for Business lets customers subscribe to a business's calendar from Google, Apple, Outlook or SoKal. Every business we onboard gets tracked on the same numbers:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Subscriber growth | How many people chose to put your schedule on their calendar |
| Active subscribers | How many calendars are still pulling your events, beyond the people who tapped once and forgot |
| Subscriber retention | How long people keep your calendar before removing it, our version of an unsubscribe rate |
Here's what we can't measure yet: whether people actually show up. We don't see a business's door or its register. When a business shares its own check-in or sales numbers, we'll add attendance to the picture. Until then, we won't guess.
We'll publish what we find as the numbers come in, including the ones that don't look good.
So which one should you use?
If you need someone to act today, text. If you want the cheapest way to stay in touch, email. If your business runs on dates, like pop-ups, games, classes or live shows, try putting those dates where your customers already plan their week.
Want to be one of the businesses we measure? Set up your SoKal for Business page and your first month is free.