SMS vs email marketing: what each costs, what consent each needs, and how to use both

Use email for newsletters, launches, product stories, receipts with detail, and anything with more than one link. Use texts for what is short and time-sensitive: a flash sale ending tonight, a delivery today, a booking tomorrow, a cart about to expire. Ask for text consent separately from email consent, and send fewer texts than you would emails. Run both from one list so a person’s choices on each channel are kept side by side.

Rasket prices a text per message in dollars. Each plan includes some texts every month (Pro includes 200), and each message past them is billed at the plan’s price: $0.015 on Pro, falling to $0.0125 on the larger Scale tiers. Emails past a plan are far cheaper: on Pro, $0.0006 each.

Three things move the SMS side. A message is up to 160 characters (70 if it has an emoji or another special character). A longer text is sent and billed as several messages. An emoji can therefore double the cost of a text without changing its meaning. A picture message (MMS) is billed as 3 messages. And a text that fails, such as one sent to a landline, is never billed. Rasket counts a text before you send it and shows the price per message in the composer, so the cost of a campaign is known before it goes.

The lesson is not that texts are too expensive; it is that a text has to earn its price. One well-timed text that recovers an order is cheap. A weekly newsletter by text is expensive and, worse, trains people to reply STOP. The SMS feature page lists the price on every plan.

In the US, email marketing works on opt-out: CAN-SPAM lets you send commercial email until the recipient unsubscribes, provided the message is honest, carries your postal address and offers a working unsubscribe (FTC). Opt-in is still the better practice, and the EU and UK require it.

Texting is opt-in everywhere that matters. Under the FCC’s rules, an advertising text sent with automated software needs the recipient’s prior express written consent: a signed agreement, electronic signatures included, that clearly authorises that seller to send them marketing (47 CFR § 64.1200). CTIA’s guidelines say the same for promotional texts. An email opt-in, a purchase, or a phone number typed into a checkout for delivery updates is not that agreement.

Rasket keeps SMS consent as its own fact on a contact. A person subscribed to your newsletter topic has not agreed to texts until their SMS status says so; a sign-up form with a Phone step records the exact wording they saw, and can ask them to reply Y to confirm. An SMS campaign skips everyone without that consent, and Consent and STOP explains how to record it from your own forms or an import. The same thinking is behind double opt-in for email.

Email can go out at 3 am. A marketing text should not. The FCC’s rules keep telephone solicitations to between 8 am and 9 pm at the recipient’s location, and several states set shorter hours or ban Sundays and holidays. Rasket applies the strictest window that covers the phone:

• A marketing text goes out between 8 am and 9 pm in the recipient’s time zone, or the shorter hours of their state. One due outside the window waits for the next morning; nothing is dropped.
• A phone gets at most one marketing text from your team in any 16 hours, across campaigns, automations and the API. A second one is skipped rather than delayed.
• Transactional texts, such as a code or a delivery update, skip both rules, but a STOP still stops them.

The practical effect is that a text campaign is planned around the recipient’s clock, and an automation that texts is planned so its text does not collide with a campaign the same day.

Running email and SMS marketing from two tools means two lists, two consent records and two places to check before a send. In Rasket a contact carries an email address and a phone number, or only one of them, and each channel keeps its own consent:

• Email campaigns go to the contacts subscribed to the campaign’s topic.
• SMS campaigns go to the contacts whose SMS status is subscribed.
• Audience → Contacts filters by SMS subscribers beside the email ones.
• Email and SMS campaigns sit on one Campaigns list; Create campaign asks Email or SMS first.

Someone can unsubscribe from the newsletter and keep getting order texts, or reply STOP to texts and keep reading the newsletter. Both choices live on the same contact, so nobody gets a message they turned off on one channel because the other tool did not know. Texts and emails also share one API key, one set of webhooks and one log.

The cheapest way to use both is email first and a text only when the email has not worked: an SMS fallback. In a Rasket automation that is four steps on one canvas.

1. Trigger on the event that starts it, such as trial.started sent from your app, with an exit event such as subscription.created, so the run ends the moment the person does what you wanted.
2. Send email with the full story: what they get, how to finish, a button.
3. Delay long enough for the email to work, such as two days.
4. Send SMS, marketing, with one sentence and one link. If they already subscribed, the exit event ended the run and no text goes.

The text step skips anyone it should not reach and lets the run carry on: no phone, no SMS consent, a STOP, or another marketing text in the last 16 hours. A text due at night waits for the morning and the run waits with it. So the same flow serves people who agreed only to email, who get the email and nothing else, and people who agreed to both.

If you are setting SMS up for the first time, the number comes first: a toll-free number is verified on its own, and a local one goes through brand and campaign registration. Toll free verification and 10DLC registration explain both. The SMS quickstart sends your first text, and the plans page shows what each plan includes for email.