What SMS marketing metrics are and why they matter
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Want to know if your SMS marketing campaigns are really working? It’s not enough to just send text messages to your audience and hope for the best—Tracking the right SMS marketing metrics is an important part of the process. This guide explores the essential SMS campaign metrics, from delivery and open rates to revenue and ROI, to help you measure campaign success, optimize strategies, and drive better results.
Track the Right Metrics to Prove ROI: Focus on delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate to evaluate SMS campaign performance and directly attribute revenue impact.
Benchmark for Success: High open rates (up to 98%) and conversion rates (commonly 11–30%) are achievable—especially in tech and consumer sectors—making SMS a powerful channel when measured properly.
Use Integrated Tools for Smarter Campaigns: CRM-based SMS tools streamline performance tracking, automation, and personalization, helping you optimize campaigns and improve customer engagement efficiently.
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What are SMS marketing metrics, exactly, and why should you care? In short, they’re the quantifiable values that reveal your SMS campaign’s performance. Monitoring metrics like deliverability, engagement, and conversions gives you and your team valuable insight into what’s working and what’s not.
In this guide, we’ll explore the core metrics that our expert team recommends prioritizing for your SMS marketing activities. We’ll break down each metric, explain why it’s important, and provide clear formulas for calculating it. Plus, we’ll cover the essential tools you need to track the success of your SMS campaign and make informed decisions that drive real ROI.
SMS marketing metrics are specific quantitative values used to track and measure the success of your SMS campaigns. Marketers use these metrics to track campaign components, such as SMS deliverability, engagement, responses, and conversions. They can then analyze any of these metrics over a given period to pinpoint areas for improvement and set goals around specific components for a particular campaign.
Keeping an eye on your SMS marketing metrics gives you deeper insight into your campaign performance—the metrics provide a quantifiable tool for measuring increases and decreases in certain areas, giving you the opportunity to adjust your approach for the best results.
When properly monitored and assessed, the metrics related to your SMS marketing campaigns can help you:
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Depending on your campaign and business objectives, you and your team could choose to monitor any number of metrics specific to your SMS marketing campaigns. That said, certain metrics should form the foundation of any and all SMS campaign performance monitoring.
When it comes to monitoring our SMS marketing campaigns, the Nutshell team prioritizes a set of core metrics. You may already know or have heard of these marketing metric terms, but we’ll help you understand what they are, why they’re vital, and how to calculate them. Here are the metrics that matter most to our team and why they’re important to track and evaluate.
The campaign delivery rate refers to the percentage of SMS messages that successfully landed in the intended recipients’ inboxes. Incorrect phone numbers, spam filters, network problems, and service provider limitations are just some of the reasons an SMS campaign message might not reach its destination.
Just like your email mailing list, keeping your SMS marketing subscriber list clean and free of inactive subscribers and invalid numbers is one way to improve your SMS campaign deliverability.
If you’re looking to calculate your campaign delivery rate, use the following calculation:
Say you’ve just sent out an SMS marketing campaign to 1,200 recipients, of which 1,000 were successfully delivered. To work out the delivery rate for your campaign, your calculation would look like this:
The open rate metric shows you how many campaign message recipients opened your SMS versus those who didn’t, expressed in the form of a percentage value. A high open rate could tell you that your campaign’s title is engaging or that your SMS marketing message timing is on point.
Your open rate equation should look like this:
For example, if you sent and delivered 1,000 messages and 750 of those were opened, your open rate would be:
Your SMS marketing campaign messages will undoubtedly include at least one call to action (CTA) link, encouraging recipients to take a specific action. This could be a link to a product for the recipient to make a purchase, a signup form to opt-in for a newsletter, register for a webinar, or download a resource, and much more.
A high click-through rate could be a sign that your CTA placement is ideal or that your button/link text resonated with your audience.
To calculate your click-through rate, you’ll use this equation:
For example, should your campaign message have seen 1,000 deliveries, of which there were a total of 200 clicks, your campaign click-through rate is:
If a recipient clicks on your CTA, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll follow through and complete the conversion, whether signing up for your newsletter, buying your product, or anything else you would like to achieve through your campaign. The conversion rate metric tells you how many of your recipients actually took the action you wanted them to take.
Here’s what a conversion rate equation looks like:
If your SMS campaign resulted in 99 conversions, your conversion rate calculation would be:
A key engagement aspect of an SMS campaign that encourages a response is its response rate—the percentage of recipients who reply to your message. You might want to track responses if you’ve sent a survey, poll, or question to your target audience via text.
Receiving a good response rate is a sign that your message is engaging enough to make your audience want to interact with your business. A low response rate could mean that your message needs tweaking, your campaign timing is off, your request isn’t relevant, or similar.
Calculating an SMS marketing campaign response rate metric is done with this formula:
Let’s say that the campaign that delivered 1,000 messages managed to garner 40 text message replies from the audience. Your response rate equation would be:
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Your campaign opt-out rate metric indicates the percentage of recipients who unsubscribed from your SMS marketing messages after they received a text message from your business. Ensuring your message content provides value, is relevant to your audience, and is sent at the right time is essential to avoiding a high opt-out rate.
How do you calculate your SMS marketing campaign’s opt-out rate? Easy. Simply follow this formula:
So, if 20 recipients opted out of your SMS marketing messaging during a campaign that saw 1,000 text messages delivered, you’d have an opt-out rate of:
Revenue per SMS is a great metric to track if your campaign goal is to encourage recipients to purchase your products or services. Knowing the financial value of each text message sent can be helpful when calculating your campaign’s return on investment.
The formula for determining your revenue per SMS is straightforward, as follows:
To illustrate this, let’s consider our example, which comprised a total of 1,200 SMS sent. Should your campaign have resulted in $50,000 in sales, your revenue per SMS would be:
Another vital SMS marketing metric linked to determining your campaign’s return on investment is your cost per acquisition (CPA) figure—also called cost per conversion (CPC). Your CPA will tell you how much money you spent for each conversion you gained. Ideally, this is a figure you’ll want to keep as low as possible to ensure your campaign efforts deliver the best possible return.
Calculating your campaign cost per acquisition can be done using the following equation:
Let’s explore a cost-per-acquisition calculation example using the 99 conversions mentioned in our conversion rate calculation example above. If your total SMS marketing campaign cost amounted to $2000, your cost per acquisition would be:
Knowing the average value of each conversion won can be helpful in gauging whether your pricing aligns with your company’s needs and goals. It’s also a handy metric to use when setting campaign goals. Your next SMS marketing campaign could include a KPI related to increasing your AOV from the past campaign’s AOV value by a specific percentage.
The AOV formula is simple yet powerful and looks like this:
Looking at our example campaign, the total SMS marketing campaign revenue was $50,000, and the total number of conversions was 99. That makes our AOV as follows:
Your campaign’s return on investment (ROI) metric is crucial for knowing whether your SMS marketing efforts were a success. ROI can be a tricky metric to measure, especially in the case of an awareness-focused campaign. But if your conversion goals relate to purchases or have a monetary value, and you know the cost of your campaign, your ROI equation will be:
What does that mean for our example SMS campaign above? We know the total campaign revenue was $50,000, and the total campaign cost was $2,000. That means our ROI would be:
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You’ll need a few key tools in your marketing arsenal to boost your SMS sales and marketing game. These tools will help you and your team streamline your SMS marketing processes, track performance, and analyze metrics to enhance current and future campaign success.
Putting your SMS marketing campaign on autopilot is a great way to maximize your marketing team’s resources. With a marketing automation solution, you’ll be able to automate certain tasks and activities essential to the SMS campaign process, giving your team more time to focus on high-impact, mission-critical tasks.
You’ll typically find automation software designed for SMS campaigns on dedicated SMS marketing platforms. Sourcing SMS marketing automation tools that integrate with your other sales and marketing-focused software is ideal.
Most SMS marketers use Google Analytics UTM parameters to track campaign performance. Depending on your experience, you may need to call tech support to help you set this one up. But once you’ve integrated UTM parameters into your SMS campaign URLs, you can monitor essential metrics like click-through rates, open rates, conversion rates, and more.
Although some SMS marketing platforms offer SMS analytics software, which often comes with a dashboard, the better solution is to find a platform that allows you to track and evaluate these metrics against other types of campaigns.
Having your SMS automation, campaign analytics, and audience segmentation tools linked is also incredibly beneficial and highly advisable. Modern CRM solutions can benefit your SMS marketing team, providing key campaign insights and automation capabilities while also making it easy to group and target audiences, collaborate and share data with team members, and execute a multi-channel marketing approach.
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Want to learn more about SMS marketing, its metrics, and what to look for when tracking performance for campaign success? You may find these FAQs helpful.
Key SMS marketing KPIs measure performance in relation to long- and short-term campaign goals. Metrics are numerical values used to monitor various campaign activities, such as revenue growth, customer engagement, etc.
What is considered a good conversion rate metric for an SMS marketing campaign differs somewhat from one industry to another. According to a recent study, an SMS marketing conversion rate metric between 21% and 30% is ideal.
That said, businesses in industries like consumer services, retail, and ecommerce typically see lower conversion rates, between 11% and 20% on average. On the other hand, businesses in the tech industry often experience SMS marketing conversion rates of between 31% and 40%.
The average open rate for SMS marketing campaigns is significantly higher than the average open rate for email marketing campaigns, which is why it’s a popular channel for marketers. According to Forbes, the average SMS campaign open rate stands at a whopping 98%.
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Customers on our Marketing Pro plan (available to all Nutshell Sales customers) have access to powerful SMS marketing tools to help them create impactful, custom SMS campaigns that expand their reach and drive business growth. With it, you’ll also enjoy leading email marketing A/B testing tools, a no-code drag-and-drop landing page builder, web forms, and advanced marketing reporting, including a customizable marketing dashboard.
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