SMS Marketing in 2026: Why Text Still Beats Email

Let's start with the data:

- **SMS open rate**: 98% - **Email open rate**: 20% (and dropping) - **SMS response rate**: 45% - **Email response rate**: 6% - **Average time to read SMS**: 3 minutes - **Average time to read email**: 6 hours

Email isn't dead, but for local businesses — restaurants, salons, gyms, real estate agents — SMS is the channel that actually gets read.

If you're a local coffee shop, you don't need a 10-email drip sequence with A/B tested subject lines. You need to text your 500 regulars: 'Free extra shot today, mention this text.'

That's it. That's the whole campaign. And it works because your customers actually see it.

The biggest mistake small businesses make with marketing is copying enterprise playbooks. Enterprise does email because they have millions of contacts and the math works at scale. You have 500-5,000 contacts. At that scale, SMS wins every time.

TextAlerts.ai is our portfolio company built specifically for AI-powered SMS marketing. What makes it different:

**AI Campaign Generation**: Describe your promotion in natural language ('I want to run a happy hour special this Friday') and the AI generates compliant SMS copy, schedules optimal send times, and segments your audience.

**Smart Scheduling**: ML-based send time optimization. The system learns when each contact is most likely to engage and staggers sends accordingly.

**Compliance Built In**: TCPA compliance, opt-out handling, quiet hours — all automated. This is the part that trips up most businesses.

**Single-Login Ecosystem**: Because TextAlerts.ai is part of the TKC portfolio, users get access to our entire tool suite with one account.