The channel you cannot afford to get wrong.

Four layers. Compliance and consent capture, so the programme is legal and provable. List growth, so it has somewhere to go. Automated journeys — welcome, cart, browse, back-in-stock, replenishment, appointment and win-back — which produce most of the revenue without adding fatigue. And campaigns plus measurement, so you send less and prove more. Good providers also handle carrier registration, brand vetting and delivery monitoring, because a message that gets filtered never had a chance to convert.

SMS marketing is legal with proper consent, and two changes matter. Since 11 April 2025, an opt-out must be honoured within a reasonable time not exceeding 10 business days and revocation can be made in any reasonable way, so your platform has to catch STOP wherever it arrives. Separately, the one-to-one consent rule that would have reshaped lead-generation consent was vacated by the Eleventh Circuit in January 2025 and deleted by the FCC in July. We build to the current rules and document everything; your counsel approves the final wording, since we provide marketing services rather than legal advice.

Make the ask small, the value obvious and the frequency honest. Two-tap mobile sign-up converts far better than a form; keywords on packaging, receipts and in-store signage recruit people who already like you; checkout and account flows catch buyers at their warmest moment. State how often you will message and then keep to it — that single promise does more for long-term list health than any incentive. We coordinate with email so a customer is never asked twice for the same permission, and we never buy or rent numbers.

Less than most brands assume, and with more reason behind each send. For most programmes two to four campaigns a month, plus journeys that trigger on real behaviour, sits comfortably. Journeys are effectively unlimited because they are relevant by design. We enforce a per-subscriber frequency cap and quiet hours in the platform rather than trusting a calendar, then use unsubscribe rate and delivered-versus-sent as the early warning that the pace is too high. The right number is the one your list tolerates while revenue per subscriber holds.

They divide the work rather than compete. SMS takes the short, urgent, time-boxed job — a delivery update, a genuine deadline, an appointment reminder, a back-in-stock alert. Email takes explanation, storytelling and anything that needs images or length. Suppression rules stop a customer getting both about the same thing minutes apart, and both channels read from one set of segments so the picture of a customer stays consistent. Our email marketing and automation teams work from the same plan.

Rather than quote a headline multiple, we anchor to published benchmarks and then measure your own baseline. Klaviyo, working from data across more than 110,000 brands, rates a campaign click rate of 14.6% or above as great and below 5.9% as critical, with flows banding at 10.9%-14.9%. What matters commercially is revenue per subscriber and per message, and how much of it survives without a discount. We report both from the first month so the programme is judged on contribution rather than a click rate that flatters everybody.

Usually registration or content, not luck. Traffic sent from an unregistered or poorly vetted brand gets filtered by carriers; so do messages with link shorteners that look like spam, missing brand identification, or campaigns to numbers that never really opted in. We check delivered versus sent as a standing metric, complete carrier registration and brand vetting properly, use branded links, identify the sender in every message, and keep complaint rates low with hygiene and caps. It is recoverable, and it is much cheaper to prevent.

It depends on volume and use case. Ten-digit long codes are the default for most brands and are fine once the brand and campaign are registered properly. Toll-free numbers suit moderate volume and are quick to verify. Short codes cost more and take longer to provision but carry the highest throughput and the best delivery for large sends. We recommend based on your expected volume, the countries you message and whether you need two-way conversation, and we handle the registration paperwork either way.

Yes, and it is one of the most valuable uses of the channel. We set up two-way threads with routing so a genuine question reaches a person rather than an automated dead end, define which intents get an instant automated answer and which escalate, and give your team the context they need in one view. Where you already run a support desk, we integrate rather than duplicate it. Conversational volume also tells us what to fix on the website and in the journeys, which is a benefit most brands do not expect.

Most brands are best served by the messaging tool their customer data already lives in: Klaviyo or Attentive for ecommerce, Braze or Iterable for larger lifecycle programmes, HubSpot where sales owns the relationship, and Twilio-based stacks when you need custom texting workflows. Lighter tools such as SimpleTexting, SlickText, Textedly or TextMagic are genuinely good for smaller contact lists and simple campaigns, and several offer a free trial before you commit. Pricing normally combines a monthly platform plan with a per-message rate, so the honest comparison is total cost per thousand messages delivered plus the features you will actually use — segmentation, flows, two-way support and reporting — not the headline plan price. We recommend based on your contacts, your volume and the integrations you need, and we are happy to work in whatever you already pay for.

They are useful, not loud. The best programmes we see send fewer messages than their competitors, segment carefully, and use texting for the moments where speed genuinely helps the customer: a delivery update, an appointment reminder, a back-in-stock alert, a support reply. They also measure honestly — revenue per subscriber rather than clicks, and how much of that revenue survives without a discount. Practically, that means strong opt-in wording, clean phone number data, tight copy, a hard frequency cap, and easy opt-out and support paths so people trust the channel enough to stay subscribed. Everything else is optimisation on top of those basics.

The first engagement is usually a fixed-scope build: compliance and consent audit, sign-up rebuild, the core journeys, reporting and a first campaign calendar, priced up front so you approve a number rather than an open-ended retainer. After that it is a monthly fee scoped to the campaign volume and optimisation you want, with message costs paid directly to your platform so there is no margin hidden in your sending. You keep the platform, the data and the consent records, whatever happens next.