Email vs SMS Marketing: Which Converts Better?

In Brief: Email or SMS?

The answer depends on what the campaign has to do. Email wins on newsletters, launches and anything that needs explaining, because the cost per send is close to zero. SMS wins on hourly discounts, delivery alerts and second-stage cart reminders, with open rates near 98 percent by industry averages. On a growing list you do not pick one, you sequence them: email carries the information, SMS compresses the timing. The cost gap makes that sequence mandatory, since every SMS is billed per message.

Picture a permission-based list of 10,000 people and one campaign. On the email side that send disappears into your monthly plan and produces no separate invoice. On the SMS side the same list costs 2,500 TL at 0.25 TL per message. Same audience, same day, 2,500 TL between them.

Turkey adds a second layer. Commercial SMS requires a registered, approved consent in IYS, and email requires explicit consent under KVKK. Stores that treat consent loosely grow their exposure to fines rather than their campaign performance. A channel comparison never fits into an open-rate table alone.

For a brand selling through Trendyol and Hepsiburada, the list collected on its own site is the one asset the marketplace can never touch. Used through the right channel, it produces revenue that runs independently of ad budget.

The two channels do not have the same cost structure

Email platforms charge by subscriber count or monthly send volume. Four campaigns a month to a 5,000-person list or eight, the invoice usually stays the same. Marginal cost is close to nothing. The real constraint on email is not money, it is your list's patience: send too often and unsubscribes climb.

On SMS, every character lands on the invoice

Bulk SMS packages price a message between 0.10 and 0.30 TL depending on volume; use the rate in your own contract. The surprise shows up in character counts. The moment you use Turkish characters, a single message drops from 160 characters to 70, so a 180-character text with diacritics bills as three messages and the cost triples.

Avoiding that is straightforward. Brand name first, offer in one sentence, short link instead of a long campaign URL. A message like "STORE: 40% off all shoes until 23.59 today. Link: xyz.co/a1 Stop: RET" fits one message and cuts the bill to a third.

Monthly math on a 10,000-person list

Item	Email	SMS
Unit cost per send	Near zero	0.25 TL (0.10-0.30 TL by package)
One campaign, 10,000 people	Inside the plan	2,500 TL
Long text with Turkish characters	No difference	3 messages, 7,500 TL
Four campaigns a month	Inside the plan	10,000 TL
Platform fee	Monthly subscription	Prepaid package
As the list grows	Steps up in tiers	Rises linearly

That last row is the one most brands miss. Growing an email list from 10,000 to 50,000 might double your invoice. Growing an SMS list by the same factor multiplies it fivefold, because you pay per delivered message. Draw the two curves separately when you plan for scale.

Because SMS carries a real unit cost, low basket-value products push the return negative quickly. If your average order is 350 TL, a 2,500 TL send breaks even at roughly 8 extra orders, and that number climbs once you calculate on net margin. The guide to calculating ROAS step by step helps you set that threshold with your own numbers.

Side by side: opens, clicks, conversions

Industry averages show the character of each channel clearly. Email open rates sit between 15 and 25 percent, and well-segmented lists push past 30. SMS lands near 98 percent, with most reads in the first three minutes. The gap comes from arriving as a phone notification rather than a queued inbox item.

Metric	Email	SMS
Open rate	15-25%	98%
Click-through rate	2-5%	15-20%
Conversion rate	1-3%	5-10%
Delivery time	Minutes, sometimes hours	Seconds
Delivery rate	95-98%	98-99%
Content capacity	Practically unlimited	160 characters, 70 in Turkish
Personalisation	Segment, behaviour, product picks	Name and a few dynamic fields
Automation depth	Multi-step flows	Single triggers

A high rate is not the same as high profit

A 98 percent open rate looks impressive and, on its own, misleads. Run the example. An email campaign to 10,000 people added no real cost and converted at 2 percent, producing 200 orders. The same list by SMS cost 2,500 TL and converted at 6 percent, producing 600 orders. SMS sold more; email was far more efficient per lira.

Read it this way: SMS is not there to add sales on top, it is there to catch the people email missed. Firing the same campaign through both channels at once burns budget, while a sequenced send cuts SMS volume by around 70 percent and holds total conversions steady.

Only testing reveals the real numbers for your own audience. The walkthrough on running a proper split test shows the discipline of changing one variable at a time. Keep separate test calendars per channel, since sampling cost on SMS forces smaller test groups.

Which channel works for which campaign

Channel choice follows urgency. If the reader has to act within the hour, send SMS. If the decision can take a few days, send email.

Where email clearly wins

• Weekly newsletters and blog announcements: long copy, images and several links.
• Product launches: room for feature explanations, price options and comparison tables.
• The first cart reminder: you can show the actual products sitting in the basket.
• Segmented offers: a deal for people who bought from one category in the last 60 days.

Where SMS clearly wins

• Timed discounts: "until 23.59 today" campaigns cannot tolerate delivery lag.
• Shipping alerts: a Yurtici, Aras or MNG tracking number needs to land immediately.
• The second cart reminder: a short nudge three hours later if the email went unopened.
• VIP early access: telling loyal customers two hours before the sale opens.

With that split in place you plan the calendar by campaign, not by channel. Take a November sale week. The announcement goes by email ten days ahead, the reminder three days ahead, and in the final six hours SMS goes only to people with items left in their cart. Total SMS spend stays in the hundreds of lira.

Your on-site forms need to follow the same split: separate boxes for email and SMS, never one checkbox for both. The guide on turning a website into a sales machine covers where those forms belong and which offers pull the highest sign-up rate.

How to prove the channel actually drove the sale

Most stores look at revenue after a send and declare that email worked. That is not measurement. You were also spending on Google Ads that day and posting on Instagram. Separating the contribution means tagging links with UTM parameters.

A consistent naming rule is enough. Use utm_source=email and utm_source=sms, and put the campaign code plus date into utm_campaign, for example november-sale-2026. If you shorten links, add the UTM before shortening or the parameters vanish. Open the traffic report by source and you see how many sessions and orders each send produced.

Record three numbers for every campaign

• Send cost: message count times unit price on SMS, the campaign's share of the plan on email.
• Net revenue from the send: after refunds, matching your iyzico or PayTR report.
• Unsubscribes and opt-outs: this is where the long-term cost of a channel hides.

The third item is the one people skip. If 40 people replied RET to a send, you lost those customers permanently. In an audience spending an average of 900 TL a year, that is 36,000 TL of forfeited revenue. Put that line in the report and decisions start looking different.

With measurement in place, the real drop-off point gets easier to spot. High clicks and low orders mean the problem is not the channel, it is the product page or the checkout step. The article on raising your ecommerce conversion rate gives checklists for that distinction.

Sequenced flows: carts, launches and win-back

Using both channels together does not mean sending the same message twice. You build one flow, and each channel is the vehicle for a step.

Abandoned cart, three steps

Step one goes out as email 30 minutes after the cart is left behind, showing the products, prices and one button back to checkout. Skip the discount and just remind. Step two fires three hours later by SMS, only to people who never opened that email. Step three lands 24 hours later as an email carrying a 10 percent coupon.

The filter on step two is what makes this work. Anyone who opened and clicked never receives the SMS. Across 10,000 abandoned carts, volume drops from 10,000 to 2,500 messages, turning a 2,500 TL send into a 625 TL one. Industry data suggests flows of this shape can lift cart recovery to around 35 percent.

Product launch, four steps

A short teaser email goes out seven days ahead, and a second email carries product detail and pricing three days out. On launch morning, only customers who spent above 10,000 TL in the last twelve months get an SMS with two hours of early access. The official announcement reaches the full list by email at midday.

Win-back, three steps

Start with an email carrying a 15 percent coupon to people who have not ordered in 90 days. If nothing comes back within two weeks, one SMS follows. Still silent means a third email offering free shipping instead of a discount, after which the contact moves to a dormant list. Sending SMS to dormant contacts raises opt-out rates and complaint risk.

All three flows can be built from the automation screen under the marketing section of your Tecof panel, using cart abandonment, order completion and last order date as triggers. For the SMS steps, connect a local provider from the integrations page.

KVKK and IYS: what a broken consent setup costs

Sending commercial electronic messages in Turkey requires the consent to be registered in IYS. An SMS sent against a consent that was never uploaded counts as an unpermitted send. Email sits under a similar rule: KVKK requires explicit consent, and a pre-ticked checkbox does not qualify.

Do not confuse the two message types

Commercial electronic messages cover campaigns and discount announcements, and need prior permission. Service messages cover order confirmations, shipping notices and verification codes, and need no commercial consent. Stores that miss this either shrink their notification list for no reason or dress a campaign up as a service message and take on real risk.

A consent setup that holds up in practice

• Separate checkboxes for email and SMS on the signup form, both left unticked.
• Double opt-in on email: a confirmation link once the address is entered.
• Upload every SMS consent to IYS and check approval status regularly.
• Opt-out keyword in every SMS, with same-day removal for anyone who uses it.
• Put a one-click unsubscribe link in the footer of every email.
• A permission refresh every six months for contacts who never engage.

A preference centre keeps you from losing the contact entirely. When someone clicks unsubscribe, offer choices instead of an exit: one message a month, discounts only, or a full stop. A meaningful share of people who see that screen choose lower frequency over leaving.

Track current obligations on the official IYS site, since approval processes change over time.

Choosing tools and setting them up for Turkey

List size and technical capacity decide the tooling. A small store has no use for an enterprise SMS platform, and a large brand will not fit into a free plan.

On the email side

Mailchimp gets small lists moving quickly; its templates let you ship a first campaign in an afternoon. Klaviyo is built for ecommerce, with segments fed by product and order data, at a higher monthly price. Brevo sits in the middle and keeps both channels in one panel on a smaller budget.

On the SMS side

If you send inside Turkey, a local provider with IYS integration saves considerable work. Netgsm and Ileti Merkezi handle consent synchronisation from their own panels. A global platform means building the IYS mapping yourself, which turns into a development project. API-first services like Twilio suit brands with an engineering team and frustrate teams that expect a dashboard.

Practical match by list size

List size	Email	SMS	Monthly budget guide
0-5,000	Mailchimp or Brevo	Local provider, prepaid package	1,000-2,500 TL
5,000-50,000	Brevo or Klaviyo	Local provider, monthly package	4,000-15,000 TL
50,000+	Klaviyo	Enterprise SMS contract	20,000 TL and above

On Tecof you run email campaigns and automations inside the panel and connect your SMS provider as an integration, so customer, order and cart data stay in one place and no segment gets rebuilt twice. The ecommerce platform page covers how those pieces map to the store side.

Here is the job for tomorrow morning. Save one segment of people who ordered at least once in the last 90 days and hold email consent. Mark the subset with SMS consent as a second segment. Send one campaign to the first group, leave the second untouched, and compare order counts two days later. That is the first real number that belongs to your own store.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a typical email marketing open rate?

Industry averages put open rates between 15 and 25 percent. Ecommerce sits in the lower half of that band, B2B and subscription models in the upper half. Subject line, send time and segment quality move the number directly. A well-maintained list can clear 30 percent.

Is the SMS click-through rate really higher than email?

Yes. Industry data puts SMS click-through around 15 to 20 percent against 2 to 5 percent for email, because the message arrives as a phone notification. That ratio should not be your only criterion, since cost per click on SMS is far higher. Weigh send cost against net revenue produced.

Is IYS registration mandatory for SMS in Turkey?

Consents for commercial electronic messages must be registered in IYS, and sending without that registration counts as sending without permission. Service messages such as order confirmations and shipping notices fall outside that scope. Check the official IYS site for current obligations before you launch.

Do shipping and order notifications need separate consent?

These fall into the service message category and need no commercial consent, since a customer who places an order already expects them. The line gets crossed the moment you add a campaign. Text like "Your parcel has shipped, and everything is 20 percent off today" counts as a commercial message and requires permission.

Which channel recovers abandoned carts better?

Both, in sequence. Send the first reminder by email 30 minutes later, showing the products in the cart. Send a short SMS three hours later, only to people who did not open that email. The filter cuts SMS volume to roughly a quarter while holding the recovery rate steady.

What does one SMS send to 10,000 people cost?

At 0.25 TL per message, a single send comes to 2,500 TL. Unit price ranges from 0.10 to 0.30 TL by package size, so use the rate in your contract. If the message uses Turkish characters and runs past 70 characters, that cost doubles or triples. Check the billed message count in your provider panel before sending.

How do Turkish characters affect SMS cost?

A standard SMS holds 160 characters, but Turkish characters drop the limit to 70, so a 150-character Turkish message bills as three. Writing campaign copy without diacritics can cut the cost to a third. Brand name, a one-sentence offer, a short link and the opt-out keyword usually fit inside 70 characters.

How much does send timing change results?

SMS generally performs best between 10.00 and 20.00; late-night sends bring low conversion and complaints. Email does well between 08.00 and 10.00 and again between 18.00 and 20.00. Your audience may behave differently. Send the same campaign to small groups at two different hours to find your own window.

Which tools should a small store start with?

Below 5,000 contacts, a free or low-cost email plan covers you. On SMS, start with a small prepaid package used only for cart reminders and shipping alerts. Move to campaign SMS once your email list produces steady revenue. That order protects the budget while you are still learning.