Key statistics
- 89% of US consumers have signed up to receive texts from a business, up from 66% in 2021. EZ Texting
- The average SMS campaign on Klaviyo gets a 5.6% click rate, and automated SMS flows get 9.65%. Email campaigns on the same platform average 1.69%. Klaviyo
- Automated SMS flows make up 7.6% of SMS sends but drive 45.2% of SMS revenue, earning $2.54 per recipient against $0.32 for campaigns. Klaviyo
- Automated texts earned $0.74 per message in 2025, about five times the $0.15 earned by campaign texts. Omnisend
- Getting texts too often is the top reason consumers opt out of business texts, cited by 40%. EZ Texting
- Text revenue for Klaviyo brands grew 25% over BFCM 2025, while the number of texts sent grew 34%. Klaviyo
A text message lands in the same place as a message from a friend. That's what makes SMS such a useful channel for ecommerce brands, and why it's so easy to overuse.
Most shoppers are now happy to hear from brands by text. The data also shows where the channel earns its keep: automated messages sent at the right moment, rather than frequent promotional blasts.
Below, we've gathered the most useful current SMS marketing statistics, from opt-in rates and benchmarks to the reasons subscribers leave.
How many consumers sign up for SMS marketing?
Signing up for business texts has become normal. In EZ Texting's 2026 survey of 959 US consumers, 89% said they had signed up for texts from a business, up from 66% in 2021.
SimpleTexting's annual survey shows the same steady climb. In January 2026, 85.6% of the 1,000 US consumers it asked were opted in to texts from at least one business:
US consumers opted in to texts from a business
Show the data
| 2021 | 61.8% |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 70.0% |
| 2023 | 71.0% |
| 2024 | 79.0% |
| 2025 | 84.0% |
| 2026 | 85.6% |
Subscribing also seems to affect how people shop. In EZ Texting's survey, 67% of consumers said they're more likely to buy from a business whose texts they receive. And texts get seen quickly: 32% check a new text immediately, and 87% have seen it within 15 minutes.
SMS marketing benchmarks: click and conversion rates
Klaviyo publishes the broadest SMS benchmarks, based on more than 183,000 customers. On its platform, the average SMS campaign gets a 5.6% click rate and an order rate of 0.27%. Automated flows, such as abandoned cart and welcome texts, do much better on both:
5.6%
Average click rate for SMS campaigns on Klaviyo
9.65%
Average click rate for automated SMS flows on Klaviyo
1.9%
Average order rate for automated SMS flows, against 0.27% for campaigns
The top 10% of Klaviyo brands reach a 10.44% click rate on campaigns and 16.6% on flows.
Texts also get far more clicks than email. On the same platform, the average email campaign has a 1.69% click rate:
| Metric | SMS | |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign click rate | 5.6% | 1.69% |
| Flow click rate | 9.65% | 5.58% |
Source: Klaviyo's 2026 SMS and email benchmarks.
Higher click rates don't automatically make SMS the more profitable channel, though. Each text costs money to send, and on Omnisend's platform email still earns more per message, as the next section shows.
Automated texts vs. campaigns
The clearest pattern across every SMS dataset is the gap between automated messages and broadcast campaigns. On Klaviyo, automated flows account for just 7.6% of SMS sends but drive 45.2% of SMS revenue. They earn $2.54 per recipient, against $0.32 for campaigns.
Omnisend's data, from 321 million texts sent by its merchants in 2025, shows the same thing. Automated texts earned $0.74 per message, about five times the $0.15 for campaign texts, and converted at 0.77% of sends against 0.12%.
Email still earns more per message on the same platform:
Revenue per message on Omnisend, 2025
Automated texts also reach new customers. On Klaviyo, 64.4% of SMS flow revenue comes from new buyers, compared with 20% for SMS campaigns. That makes welcome and abandoned cart texts as much an acquisition tool as a retention one.
Postscript's benchmarks, from more than 17,000 Shopify stores in 2025, break performance down by message type. The middle half of stores land in these ranges:
| Message type | Click-through rate | Conversion rate | Earnings per message |
|---|---|---|---|
| Back in stock | 36.71% to 58.70% | 7.18% to 13.80% | $5.92 to $13.34 |
| Abandoned cart | 9.53% to 17.28% | 3.97% to 7.84% | $3.52 to $10.95 |
| Browse abandonment | 7.38% to 13.65% | 1.01% to 2.38% | $0.93 to $2.85 |
| Welcome series | 4.65% to 10.85% | 0.67% to 2.67% | $0.58 to $3.05 |
| Post-purchase | 4.68% to 14.26% | 0.45% to 1.51% | $0.34 to $1.53 |
| Win-back | 2.72% to 6.36% | 0.20% to 0.89% | $0.19 to $0.82 |
| Campaign | 2.87% to 8.01% | 0.12% to 0.54% | $0.11 to $0.55 |
Source: Postscript 2026 SMS Benchmarks, 25th to 75th percentile, January 1 to December 15, 2025.
Back-in-stock and abandoned cart texts perform best because they arrive when the shopper has just shown interest in a specific product. The median Postscript store earned $0.98 per message across all its texts.
Why subscribers opt out of SMS
Frequency is the fastest way to lose a subscriber. In EZ Texting's survey, 40% said getting texts too often is their top reason for opting out, ahead of irrelevant content (18%) and inconvenient timing (10%). Another 25% chose all of the above.
Shoppers are also becoming less tolerant of frequent texts:
59%
Consumers who accept two or more business texts a day, down from 69% in 2025
41%
Consumers who'd prefer fewer than one business text a day
55%
Consumers who say too-frequent messages make them unsubscribe
When SimpleTexting asked how often people want to hear from a business, the most popular answer was once every other week (50%), followed by once a week (37%). That's a useful reference point when you plan an SMS calendar.
SMS during Black Friday and Cyber Monday
BFCM is when SMS volume peaks, and when the frequency problem is most visible. Over BFCM 2025, text revenue for Klaviyo brands grew 25% while the number of texts they sent grew 34%. Brands sent more messages, and each one earned a little less.
Attentive's brands sent 5.7 billion SMS and email messages during Cyber Week 2025, up 46% year over year, and drove nearly $2 billion in revenue. A few more figures from that week:
- The average SMS order was worth $143, up 13% year over year.
- When shoppers received both SMS and email, conversion rates were 18.4% higher than with SMS alone.
- Revenue per click from those combined campaigns was 14.9% higher.
The combined-channel result is a reminder that SMS works best as part of a program alongside email, rather than as a replacement for it. Our guide to how email, SMS and push notifications work together covers how to split the work between them.
How fast is SMS marketing growing?
Brands keep sending more texts. Omnisend's merchants increased their SMS volume by 40% in 2025, after growing it 31% in 2024.
The format is changing too. RCS, the richer messaging standard that supports images, carousels and verified sender names, grew quickly in 2025. Messaging platform Infobip reported 311% global growth in RCS traffic in 2025, and 70x growth in North America. Plain SMS still accounted for 62% of the traffic on its platform.
Is SMS's 98% open rate real?
You'll often see SMS credited with a 98% open rate and a 45% response rate. Both figures trace back to a 2016 Gartner article, which said that various sources reported rates "as high as" those numbers. Gartner was repeating figures from unnamed sources, not publishing its own research.
There's also a practical problem: SMS platforms can't track whether a text was opened, so no current benchmark measures it. Click rates, conversion rates and revenue per message are the numbers worth comparing.
What these numbers mean for ecommerce brands
Prioritize automated texts. Abandoned cart, back-in-stock and welcome texts consistently earn several times more per message than campaigns. Set those up before adding more broadcasts.
Treat frequency as a cost. Every extra text risks an opt-out, and subscribers are becoming less tolerant of frequent messages. Save campaigns for offers that are genuinely worth an interruption.
Use SMS alongside email. Email still earns more per message, while SMS gets more clicks and reaches people faster. In Attentive's Cyber Week data, shoppers who received both converted better than those who only got texts.
Measure revenue, not opens. Compare your results with the click, conversion and revenue-per-message benchmarks above, and track opt-out rates by campaign so you can see which messages cost you subscribers.
Final thoughts
Most of your customers are open to hearing from you by text, and the channel can be very profitable when messages arrive at the right moment. The data points in one direction: fewer, better-timed texts, most of them triggered by what the shopper just did.
That approach protects your list as well as your results. A subscriber who stays opted in is worth far more over time than one extra campaign send.
