SMS Marketing Copy

SMS has a 98% open rate. Email, on a good day, gets 20 to 25 percent. Social media posts reach a fraction of your followers. SMS gets read by almost everyone who receives it — usually within three minutes. That number is worth sitting with for a moment. Almost everyone who gets your text reads it.

Which means SMS copy has no margin for error. A bad email gets ignored. A bad text gets you unsubscribed — and sometimes blocked, and sometimes reported. The intimacy of the SMS channel that makes it so powerful is the same thing that makes it unforgiving.

Most businesses treat SMS like a short email. They cram as much information as possible into 160 characters, add a link, and send it to their whole list on Tuesday morning. That's not SMS marketing. That's spam with better delivery rates.

How SMS Actually Works

SMS works because it's personal. When someone gives you their phone number, they're extending a higher level of trust than an email address. They're inviting you into a channel they share with their family and friends. The copy that belongs in that channel sounds like it came from a person — not a marketing department. Short. Direct. Conversational. With a clear reason for the message and a single, obvious action to take.

Where SMS Fits in a Marketing Stack

Time-sensitive offers — when the offer expires today or the availability is genuinely limited, SMS gets the message in front of people while it's still relevant.

Appointment reminders and confirmations — reduces no-shows, builds professionalism, opens a two-way conversation at a high-trust moment.

Follow-up sequences — the text that goes out after a sales call, after a service visit, after a download.

Reactivation — for customers who haven't engaged recently. A single well-timed text often outperforms an entire email reactivation sequence for sheer response rate.

Review requests — for trades businesses specifically, a text sent immediately after a successful job — with a direct link to your GBP review form — is the highest-converting review request method by a significant margin.

What SMS Copy Includes

Strategy intake — the platform, the audience, the specific use case. Message copy — every text in the sequence or campaign, written for the channel. Compliance review — SMS has specific legal requirements around consent and opt-out language; every message is written to comply. One revision pass. Minimum project: five messages.