Text messages get opened. Emails mostly don't.
The gap isn't subtle. SMS open rates run 90-98%. Email averages somewhere around 20-37%, depending on whose numbers you trust. Response rates tell the same story: about 45% for text, roughly 6% for email. If a customer's phone buzzes, they look. If an email lands, it sits in a pile with forty others.
That's the pitch behind SimpleTexting, EZ Texting, Podium's texting product, and a dozen similar platforms. And for the right use case, the pitch holds up.
Where it actually works
Appointment reminders are the clearest win. A text that says "See you tomorrow at 2pm - reply C to confirm" cuts no-shows in a way email reminders never do, because it gets read within minutes, not hours. Review requests work the same way - a link sent right after a job, while the work is still fresh, converts better than an email that shows up the next morning buried in a promo folder.
Quick promos and last-minute openings ("Had a cancellation, can fit you in Thursday at 10 - want it?") also fit the format. It's immediate, it's short, and nobody expects a text to read like a newsletter.
What the pricing page doesn't show you
Here's the part that gets glossed over. Sending SMS from a business number in the US requires A2P 10DLC registration - a carrier-level approval process, not a checkbox in the platform's dashboard. It typically adds a separate registration fee and a review period before your first message can legally go out. Skip it, and carriers will throttle or block your texts outright.
Then there's the per-message cost. Most of these platforms bill a base monthly fee for a set number of segments, then charge per message beyond that. A single plumber sending reminders and review requests to a few hundred customers a month stays cheap. A business trying to run broadcast promos to a full contact list finds the math changes fast - and unlike email, there's no unlimited-send tier waiting at a higher plan.
And customers are less patient with SMS than they are with email. The top reasons people opt out: texting too often, content that reads as spam, and messages that don't feel relevant to them. An email list tolerates a weekly newsletter. A text list does not tolerate the same cadence - cross that line and you lose the channel that was actually working.
The honest verdict
SMS isn't a replacement for email or your other channels. It's a narrow, high-performing tool for a specific job: fast, transactional, time-sensitive messages a customer wants to receive. Reminders, confirmations, review asks, urgent openings - yes. A weekly "here's what's new" blast - that's what your email list and social channels are for.
Register properly, keep the list to messages people actually signed up for, and use it sparingly. That's the difference between a channel with a 98% open rate and a channel people quietly block.