Friend of SHIFT and professional marketing BS detector Scott Stratten asked recently:

Doing some talk research, and I just saw a post that said “SMS (text messages) have an open rate of 95%.
WTF, how do you come up with that?
Someone please back me up or prove me wrong. Either way I’m happy.

I don’t know where the original citation came from, but as data-driven PR professionals, we’d like the data too. Fortunately, getting the data is easier than ever. We commissioned a survey of US smartphone owners and asked them if they read every SMS text message sent to them:

82%, or 4 out of 5, said yes. When broken down, the only significant difference was by gender:

Above, women read fewer text messages from anyone than men.

Is the open rate 95%? No. Is it still high? Yes; 4 out of 5 of anything is a significant majority. Does this mean you should switch your marketing and communications strategy to immediately begin texting your audience? Of course not. Like any other marketing channel, don’t abuse the privilege and trust that your audience has given you.

There’s also a significantly higher cost-per-message fee with SMS messaging compared to email, so use it judiciously for the activities that generate the highest return on investment.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

Disclosure Statement

SHIFT commissioned Google Consumer Surveys to collect responses from a representative sample of 1,000 respondents who answered the question “Do you read every SMS text message sent to you?”. This survey collected 1,907 impressions and 1,030 responses for a 54% response rate with an RMSE score of 1.8%. SHIFT Communications was the sole investor in the study. The survey population was the adult Internet user population of the United States who are active smartphone owners, ascertained by survey deployment in in-app advertising. The date of the survey period was 9/26/15 – 9/28/15. Raw data is available upon request.