Most marketers underuse SMS, and the reason is mostly that it doesn’t feel exciting. There’s no creative canvas, no rich media, no algorithmic amplification. There’s a 160-character window and a phone number. That’s it. And yet, year after year, industry studies put the open rate above 90%, with most recipients reading within minutes. Email opens average somewhere in the 20s and 30s; push notifications land lower still. There’s no other channel that delivers eyes that fast at that consistency.
The catch is what all that attention is for. SMS at its best is the delivery channel for information that can’t wait: confirmations, alerts, reminders, codes. Advertising is the wrong job for it, and a legally delicate one in many markets. Treat it that way and the channel rewards you.
SMS as infrastructure
Marketing isn’t even where SMS does most of its work. The biggest volumes flow through transactional and verification messages: two-factor codes from banks and government services, delivery alerts, appointment reminders, flight changes. SMS quietly underpins a huge slice of how digital identity works day to day, which is precisely what makes it valuable for business communication. The recipient already trusts that an SMS is something to read.
When SMS is the right call
The medium suits a specific kind of communication: short, time-critical, and important enough to interrupt someone’s day. Appointment reminders. Booking confirmations. Out-of-stock notifications. Flight delays. Emergency alerts. When getting the message read in the next hour matters, SMS is the channel.
What it isn’t suited for is brand-building or storytelling. There’s no room for narrative in 160 characters; try to fit one in and you’ll either annoy the recipient or undercut the brand.
The right call also depends on geography. SMS dominates business messaging in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the Nordics; WhatsApp dominates Latin America, India, the Middle East, and most of continental Europe. The campaign that runs on SMS in Sydney probably runs on WhatsApp Business in São Paulo. The decision starts with where your audience lives.
The case for restraint
If you do want to send commercial messages by SMS, the law leans hard on consent. In Australia the Spam Act permits marketing SMS only with consent, clear sender identification, and a working unsubscribe, and the ACMA enforces it aggressively: penalties have run into the tens of millions in recent years, including $4 million against a major wagering company for messages without working opt-outs. The EU’s GDPR and the US’s TCPA draw similar lines. Transactional and factual messages sit outside most of these rules, which is exactly why alerts are the safer home for the channel.
The deeper reason for restraint is psychological. SMS sits in a place reserved for personal communication: close family, close friends, urgent business. That’s why the open rate is so high, and why over-frequency breaks the channel. For programmes that do run commercial SMS with proper consent, industry guidance has been consistent for years: 2 to 4 messages per month, maximum. The moment recipients feel you’re treating SMS like email, they unsubscribe, and SMS unsubscribes carry less forgiveness. Once the trust breaks, you don’t get a second chance with that customer.
Clean data is everything
SMS works only if your phone numbers are clean. The technical standard is E.164, the international numbering format: a leading +, then the country code, then the number, no spaces or brackets. An Australian mobile looks like +61412345678. Most platforms require it, and any number outside the format gets rejected, charged at the wrong rate, or routed to the wrong country.
Real-world databases are messy: numbers arrive as 0412 345 678, (02) 9876 5432, and a hundred other variants. Most platforms normalise these under the hood, and AI tools have made bulk cleanup fast: a messy column fed to a language model fixes the long tail in minutes. Dirty data costs real money in failed sends, bounces, and misrouted messages.
The platform landscape
If you’re choosing a platform: for global reach with developer flexibility, Twilio is the most widely adopted. Sinch and Infobip are the enterprise alternatives, with direct carrier connections in 190+ countries and stronger compliance tooling.
One real and timely thing to flag: from 1 July 2026, the ACMA requires all alphanumeric sender IDs used for SMS in Australia to be registered on its SMS Sender ID Register. Unregistered IDs will be labelled “Unverified” on recipients’ phones, which kills open rates instantly. Any platform you choose should be helping you register before then.
The equaliser
SMS does something almost no other channel can. It reaches everyone, on any phone, anywhere, with no app to download and no internet connection required. That makes it the most democratic communication channel in the modern toolkit.
I learned this travelling around Peru for work. Outside the capital, SMS reaches places email and the open internet don’t. Many urban Peruvians don’t have an email account, or have one they don’t check. But from the president to a field worker, from a professional to an artisan, from Yurimaguas (the last town the road reaches before the jungle) to the Uros floating islands in Lake Titicaca, everyone has a mobile. Often it’s an old Nokia with a battery that lasts a week. Every phone receives SMS, and those messages get read.
That reality shaped the programmes I ran. At Herbalife SAMCAM, across Central America, I rolled out SMS alongside email, retail centre videos, and PBX audio for the distributor network, and later set up similar channels at other direct-selling companies in Latin America. None of it was advertising. The messages were business notifications for an opted-in network: stock updates, event logistics, programme changes. In markets where email penetration was uneven and the field team was constantly on the road, SMS was the floor. If something needed to land everywhere, fast, on any handset, SMS was the channel that arrived.
Rural Australia is a less extreme version of the same pattern. Remote pastoral stations, mining camps, fishing villages from the Top End to Tasmania: where data coverage is patchy, SMS still arrives. Whether your customer is in Sydney or a tin-roof shed 3 hours from the nearest town, your message lands in roughly the same window.
That universality is the underlying truth.
SMS is one of the few channels that doesn’t discriminate by income, geography, or device.
In places like these, the channel can carry more than alerts. For a remote or low-connectivity audience, a consented commercial message by SMS may be the only message that reliably arrives, and that’s a legitimate call to make. The rules don’t change, though: express consent, clear identification, a working opt-out. The geography changes the value of the channel, not the law around it.
The new ground: RCS
For most of its history, SMS has been technologically frozen. 160 characters, plain text, no rich media, no read receipts, no branded sender. That changed in late 2024, when Apple released iOS 18 with native support for Rich Communication Services, the upgraded messaging standard Google had backed for years, followed weeks later by RCS for Business inside the iPhone’s native Messages app. The decade-long fragmentation between iPhone and Android messaging, the blue-vs-green bubble drama, started to dissolve. By most estimates, RCS now reaches billions of users.
What RCS adds: high-resolution images and video, read receipts, branded and verified sender profiles, carousels, action buttons, longer messages. It brings carrier-grade messaging up to roughly the WhatsApp level, inside the infrastructure everyone already has.
The feature with the most operational value may be the humblest: native read receipts. Plain SMS only ever confirmed delivery, never reading. With RCS, platforms can trigger fallback flows when a message goes unread within a set window, handing the gap to email, push, or a call. The high-confidence channel does the first pass; another channel handles the gaps.
There are caveats: rollout is carrier-dependent, cross-platform encryption is still arriving, and business senders need brand verification first. None of it is dealbreaking; RCS adoption is a matter of when.
The fundamentals haven’t moved
Phones are universal. Texts get read. The rule is restraint. The opt-in is sacred. RCS is making the channel richer, opening real new options for branded, two-way conversational messaging. But the rules of relevance and consent haven’t moved at all.
Not the most exciting channel, but the most reliable one. Use it sparingly, treat the data like the asset it is, and it works every time.