Having trouble getting results from your email or SMS marketing? You’re not alone. While 4 in 5 marketers say they would give up social media for email marketing, SMS still boasts an impressive 98% open rate, and nearly everyone reads a text message within 3 minutes. But if you rely on just one communication channel, you’re leaving money on the table.
Problem: Brands are treating email and SMS as two different silos.
Agitation: This leads to disjointed user experiences, lost leads, and missed opportunities to convert.
Solution: When used strategically together, email and SMS can form a high-converting marketing funnel that engages, nurtures, and converts customers all within the same process.
We’ll show you how to combine email and SMS into a conversion machine without annoying your audience or burning your list.
Why Email and SMS Make the Perfect Duo for High-Converting Marketing Funnel
✅ Strengths of Email: Breadth, Detail, and Deliverability
With email, you can go deeper and provide more detail than any other channel. This lets you tell compelling stories, elaborate promotional messages, or in-depth newsletters.
Many marketers have transitioned to email because of its ability to foster long-term relationships, deliver comprehensive information, and provide a pathway for customers to navigate through your sales funnel.
Email can be easily automated and is highly customizable and timely. This enables marketers to capture and activate their audience when it matters most.
✅ Advantages of SMS: Timeliness, Open Rates, and Action Triggers
SMS offers unmatched speed. Nearly 98% of text messages are read minutes after they are received. This makes SMS the best choice for urgent updates, flash sales, or exclusive offers.
SMS is also never buried in an inbox; messages will always be seen and acted upon, making SMS the best channel for quick conversions and instantaneous engagement with your customers.
✅ The Engagement Gap: What Each Channel Misses Alone
Email is good for building relationships with customers, but it is not the same as SMS. SMS gets the immediacy and urgency that email cannot. Email has specifics and depth that SMS cannot convey as fast. Together, email and SMS complement one another’s weaknesses and help provide total engagement.
✅ Conversion Multiplier Effect: How 1 + 1 = 3 in Marketing
When you bring together email details with SMS’s urgency, you have created an engagement monster. The integration of both channels neatly stacks up touchpoints, improves engagement, and ultimately, higher conversion.
The relationship and synergy of email and SMS deliver a multiplier effect for everything you have done, turning a lead into a customer for life.
Spark Editor helps you turn every WooCommerce email into a branded experience. Combine it with SMS, and you’ve got a conversion-ready communication flow.
Creating Your Integrated Marketing Funnel Framework
📌The Modern Marketing Funnel: More than AIDA
The AIDA model (Awareness; Interest; Desire; Action) isn’t sufficient in today’s ever-changing marketing environment. Modern funnels need to be agile, personalized, and multi-touch.
As customer behaviours adapt, it is important to analyze how email and SMS can work as a mechanism to provide a seamless experience throughout every stage.
📌Understanding Customer Touchpoints Across Email and SMS
In order to create an integrated funnel, it is important to understand when and how to reach your audience.
By understanding customer touchpoints across email and SMS, you can ensure you are reaching customers at the right point with the right message.
Consider the following:
✅Email is best for detailed content, consideration, and storytelling.
✅SMS is appropriate for timely, actionable reminders or limited-time offers, or personal notifications.
Strategic blending of SMS and Email maximises customer engagement and allows you to create seamless transitions for prospects through the funnel and higher conversions at every stage of the funnel.
The Double Opt-In Strategy That Attracts Quality Leads
When you’re building an email and SMS list, it’s important to attract quality leads.
The Double Opt-In strategy, where users have to confirm their subscription through email or SMS, can help eliminate fake registrations and ensure that you reach those customers who are genuinely interested.
In the end, it improves your deliverability and indirectly builds trust, given that it meets the privacy and permission marketing principles.
🔸Value Exchange: Making a Great Offer for Consumers to Opt In
Asking for a value exchange from consumers is the best way to affect sign-up opportunities. The clearer the value, the more likely the consumer will supply their details as prompted.
Examples for valuable exchange include offering discounts, free trials, downloadable resources, or access to products before they are released in exchange for your email/SMS opt-in.
🔸GlideCampaign’s Smart Forms – Collect Low Friction Email and SMS
GlideCampaign’s Smart Forms make this easy by collecting email and SMS contacts at the same time.
Smart Forms make the process of opt-in low friction, ensuring customers can easily confirm their opt-in without experiencing a grueling, lengthy form or having to answer the same questions multiple times.
Easier opt-in procedures result in more sign-ups and leads with higher quality for your marketing funnel.
🔸Awareness Tactics with Email and SMS
At the top of your funnel, you’re trying to create brand awareness and capture attention. Leveraging email and SMS together means you can reach the area that is most engaging to customers at the most touchpoints.
🔸Content Mapping
Begin by mapping out your content on both platforms. For example, you could create an email lead magnet that is an eBook, a checklist, or even a webinar.
You could then promote it via SMS. This allows your customer to experience a multi-channel strategy that brings focus to your brand voice and message.
Use SMS to deliver immediate alerts to new content while letting your email nurture their lead with more detailed information.
🔸Creating FOMO
One of the most impactful ways to increase awareness is to create urgency! Use an SMS to promote a flash sale, or offer exclusive invitations to an event, and use email to share additional value behind the offer.
This combination creates FOMO that is likely to get some of your leads to respond more quickly.
🔸Cross-channel Awareness
You’re not limited to promoting content on a single platform. Promote your email content via SMS, and vice versa.
Using both SMS and email will ensure that you maximize the area under the engagement (or awareness) curve by ensuring leads don’t miss your key messages. Maximize awareness stage engagement and reach through a cross-channel strategy!
Middle-of-Funnel nurturing strategies
At this stage, leads are aware of your brand and have expressed interest in it. Now, it’s about building trust and helping them make a purchase. You can provide a personalized, streamlined experience when you combine your email and sms in a thoughtful, coordinated way for lead nurturing.
🎯How do you build trust through coordinated messaging?
👉Establish alignment with sms and email: Sharing aligned messaging across sms and email reinforces your brand voice and builds confidence with customers.
👉Value: Email allows you to go in depth with content (case studies, blog posts), and sms allows you to share timelier updates (exclusive offers, reminders, etc).
🎯Behavioral triggers that can increase engagement
👉SMS check-ins: Based on timing, follow-up SMS with a check-in, having customers respond about interacting with your content. For example: “Did you get a chance to check out our latest product?“
👉Buyer intent: Utilize actions (e.g., abandoned carts or browsing) to inform targeted follow-up messaging via both email and sms.
👉Move past names: Focus on content personalization based on their customer journey – an example would be an SMS notification update on a specific product they were interested in or an email offer based on their previous browsing history.
This ensures your messaging is relevant to their needs.
Bottom-of-Funnel Conversion Strategies
At the end of your marketing funnel, customers are ready to purchase. But even with their finger hovering over the mouse, they might not go through with it — and it gets in the way of conversion.
So what does it take to finally engage a person and turn it into a valuable experience for them and you?
A well-coordinated, multi-touch, multi-channel strategy that makes your offer hard to resist, generates urgency, and dispels any lingering hesitation.
🧿Using Email and SMS together
👉Email: Send a long, information email that explains your offer, detailed with calls-to-action (limited time offer, big benefits of the product, etc).
👉SMS: Follow up with a short, direct, urgent message. This will be sent to push the person to do it now. Think it could be as simple as: “shopping cart about to expire! Don’t miss out.”
🧿Example of a successful Bottom-of-funnel push
The timing of at least some of your email texts is essential. Use this to set a final push sequence to do the things mentioned above:
👉Email: Send a reminder email about the day before the shopping cart expiry.
👉SMS: Send a follow-up final reminder email about 2-4 hours before the offer, then again confirm any urgency in the last SMS.
Conversion-Optimized Templates and Toolkit from GlideCampaign
GlideCampaign creates killer email series and SMS offer Templates created to drive conversions. Craft compelling, personalized messages for your customers with perfect timing, allowing you to ensure none of your chances to close the sale are lost.
Post-Purchase Engagement (Customer Retention)
🎯The Golden 48 Hours – Strengthening the Relationship Right Away
The first 48 hours post-purchase are very important. This is the time that your customer is most satisfied and more likely to engage with your brand. Make sure to take this opportunity to build trust and create a lasting impression.
✅Send a personalized thank-you email/SMS.
✅Provide shipping details clearly.
✅Include an open-ended satisfaction survey to show that you are ethically and professionally invested in their experience.
🎯Email Onboarding Sequences to Lower Support Tickets
If you do an effective onboarding sequence, you can significantly cut down customer queries and support tickets. Your onboarding email series should:
✅Welcome the customer and thank them for their purchase.
✅Walk them through product usage/installation and provide video tutorials.
✅Provide FAQs to mitigate and resolve common questions before they arise.
🎯The Cross-Sell and Upsell Matrix – What to Offer and When?
Once the customer has made a purchase, lead them to complementary products:
👉Cross-Sell: Recommend products that align with their initial purchase (e.g., accessories).
👉Upsell: Recommend premium options or comparable, higher value products.
👉Timing: Allow time for the customer to use the product (3-7 days), and then put forth an upgrade/upsell strategy to avoid overwhelming product options right away.
This same tactic will grow lifetime value while keeping the relationship warm.
Evaluating Performance And Improving Your Funnel
🔸More Than Just Open Rates: Actual Metrics That Drive Revenue
Open rates are merely the surface-level metric. To get a clearer understanding of how to evaluate your funnel, you must look at other metrics that include click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate metrics, and average order value (AOV).
These metrics will address whether emails and messages (text or mobile) are generating the customer action you are looking for: make a purchase, fill out a form, or engage with content.
🔸Channel Attribution: Which touchpoints pushed conversions
Understanding which touchpoints are pushing leads through your funnel is invaluable to you.
Through several channel attribution models (for example, these include first-click, last-click, and multi-touch), understand what combination of email and messaging is driving conversions, and thus, enabling you to focus on optimizing your marketing budget on the avenues that are providing the best results.
🔸Split Testing Framework for Multi-channel campaigns
For proper marketing funnel optimization, A/B testing your funnel inputs across email and SMS is fundamental. Testing across different messaging, timing, and offers allows you to recognize which resonates best. You must capture your test results and identify the best-converting combinations for each respective funnel stage.
🔸Cohort Analysis: Tracking Improvements Over Time
Cohort analysis lets you track specific customer groups over time, helping you understand which segments respond best to email and SMS. This data allows for more targeted campaigns, ensuring continuous funnel optimization and increased lifetime value.
Common Errors to Recognize
📌Message Fatigue: Striking that Balance
One of the largest mistakes brands make is sending excessive messages, leading to message fatigue where your audience may tune out or unsubscribe altogether.
To avoid this, only send messages based on user engagement and behaviors. Segment out your list, and keep your subscribers engaged with relevant content at a frequency that doesn’t overwhelm them.
📌Channel Redundancy: When Not to Reuse Content
Sending the same message with a combination of email and SMS seems redundant and has the potential of being annoying to your customers.
This is not to say that you can’t use both channels, but rather that you want to leverage them depending on the strengths of a channel.
Use SMS to create a prompt that is quick and actionable instead of content that is valuable and detailed. With that approach, you will create an experience without redundancy.
📌Timing Disasters: Stand Out Hours that Kill Conversions
Sending messages at the wrong time leads to engagement woes. Avoid early morning or late-night texts and emails that interrupt a customer’s daily routine.
Studies show that mid-morning or early afternoon is generally a sweet spot for both channels. Make sure to test and adjust as necessary.
📌Mobile Optimization Failures
If your emails or SMS messages aren’t mobile-friendly, you’re leaving money on the table. Optimize for mobile by using responsive designs and concise content.
Ensure your CTAs are easy to click, and your messaging is visually appealing on all devices to avoid frustrating potential customers.
Conclusion
Combining email and SMS can be a game-changer in building a high-converting marketing funnel. If you plan to use both channels strategically, you can put together a seamless, engaging experience to nurture leads and drive conversions.
Remember to deliver the right message at the right time and utilize the power of GlideCampaign (or other powerful tools) to make this seamless experience a reality.
Measure continuously, optimize for results, and avoid missteps like message fatigue and covering the same channels at conflicting times. With practice, this integrated approach will revolutionize your entire marketing strategy and deliver massive ROI.
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