What is an SMS campaign? Why texting still works for marketing

Email inboxes are crowded. Social feeds are algorithmic. Brands can now produce more marketing campaigns in an afternoon with AI than many teams once created in a week.

Your text-message inbox probably feels different.

In EZ Texting’s 2026 survey of 959 US consumers, 54% said they receive six or more business emails a day. Only 24% said the same about business texts. SMS isn’t an unused channel, but there’s still considerably less competition for attention there. 

That makes SMS interesting again. It also raises the stakes: when a brand appears in a relatively quiet inbox, the message needs a good reason to be there.

TL;DR: An SMS campaign is a planned text-message campaign sent to a defined audience for a specific purpose. It could remind customers about an appointment, promote an offer or react to something they’ve done. A campaign combines the message with targeting, timing and a way to measure the result.

What is an SMS campaign?

An SMS campaign uses text messages to communicate with a selected group of contacts around a particular goal.

Picture a dental receptionist texting one patient because tomorrow’s appointment has changed. That’s a text message.

Now, imagine the practice automatically identifies everyone with an appointment the following day, sends each person a reminder at the right time and later checks whether no-shows fell. This is an SMS campaign.

With an SMS campaign, there's a reason it's being sent, a target audience that should receive it and an outcome the business can evaluate afterwards.

SMS marketing campaigns can be promotional, but they don’t have to be. Delivery notifications, booking reminders and back-in-stock alerts can all use the same channel. In EZ Texting’s 2026 study, consumers showed particularly strong interest in delivery and order updates as well as appointment reminders, which helps explain why SMS works so naturally around practical, time-sensitive moments.

SMS has something most marketing channels are losing: space

There’s a strange tension in marketing in 2026. Producing content has become dramatically easier, yet gaining attention hasn’t.

Salesforce reports that 75% of marketers have adopted AI, while 84% still say they’re running generic campaigns. 

The technology has improved much faster than many brands’ ability to make communication feel relevant. 

SMS doesn’t magically solve that problem. A text can still feel generic.

However, what SMS does have is scarcity.

Only 24% of respondents in EZ Texting’s consumer study reported receiving at least six business texts a day, compared with more than half receiving that many business emails. The same study found that 87% check texts within 15 minutes.

That combination creates an unusual position for marketers: a message can reach an inbox that isn’t as saturated as email and is checked frequently throughout the day.

However, the opportunity isn’t to fill the space. If brands respond to lower SMS saturation by duplicating every email campaign as a text, the advantage disappears quickly. The stronger use of SMS is selective: send when receiving a short message now is genuinely better for the customer than finding a longer message somewhere else later.

How an SMS campaign comes together

The message is often the last part that needs creating.

Let’s say you’re a retailer that wants to tell customers a popular item is available again. Sending “Back in stock! Buy now” to your entire database misses the strongest signal it already has: some customers actually asked about that product or viewed it while it was unavailable.

A stronger campaign begins there: the audience can be built around those customers. The message can arrive when stock is available and take the recipient directly to the product. Instead of judging the campaign only on delivery, the retailer can look at clicks or purchases from that group.

The same logic changes completely for an appointment reminder. There’s no reason to choose the audience based on purchase history. The relevant signal is a booking happening tomorrow, and the outcome might be attendance rather than a click.

The interesting part is how much those choices depend on one another: 

• Targeting changes what the message needs to explain. 
• Timing affects how urgent the copy should feel. 
• The goal determines which metric tells you anything meaningful afterwards.

Examples of SMS campaigns

Large SMS numbers are easy to quote. The more interesting question is what brands were doing when those numbers appeared.

Yankee Candle uses SMS when intent is higher

Yankee Candle describes email as a channel that gives the brand scale, while SMS adds urgency when shoppers appear closer to converting.

The company moved away from volume-led sending toward more deliberate segmentation across the customer journey. During Holiday 2025, that strategy was part of a 211% year-over-year increase in SMS-attributed revenue. Its SMS-attributed revenue was also up 211% YoY in Q1 2026, while sends per subscriber remained around eight to nine per month.

Source

The useful lesson isn’t “send eight texts a month.” That number belongs to Yankee Candle’s audience and business.

The more transferable part is the role the channel plays. SMS isn’t being asked to replace the reach of email. It becomes more prominent when the customer signal suggests that immediacy could help.

POPFLEX put SMS inside journeys people had already started

POPFLEX took a different route. The brand added targeted text reminders to browse, cart, and checkout abandonment flows during its holiday activity.

Instead of another broad promotional blast, those messages reached people who had already shown interest. Klaviyo reports that POPFLEX’s revenue from automations during its eight-day BFCM sale grew 3.3× year over year, while SMS revenue during the sale rose 172%. 

Again, the numbers are vendor case-study results, not benchmarks everyone should expect.

What makes the use case interesting is the trigger: someone browsed, added something to a basket or began checkout. The text had context before it was written.

That’s a stronger starting point than asking, “What SMS can we send this week?”

Some of the best SMS campaigns don’t look like marketing campaigns

The channel becomes much easier to understand once you stop picturing every SMS as a discount code. 

• A customer has a table booked for 7:30pm tomorrow, so a reminder at 5pm today may prevent a forgotten reservation.
• Someone has been waiting for a product in their size to return. A text when it becomes available solves a problem they already told the brand about.
• A home buyer is due to view a property tomorrow morning. Sending the address and appointment confirmation by SMS gives them information they’re likely to need while away from their inbox. 

Promotions still belong here. In EZ Texting’s 2026 research, discounts were the most frequently cited reason that would make consumers more likely to opt in to business texts. Yet the same report found that only 9% prefer generic messages.

Those findings fit together quite neatly. People aren’t necessarily objecting to marketing messages, but they object when the message has little connection to them.

SMS being good at immediacy doesn’t make it good at everything.

When SMS is the wrong channel

A complicated pricing update usually needs more than a text can comfortably carry. So does detailed product education, a long policy change or anything where the customer needs context before making a decision.

Manufactured urgency creates another problem. If every promotion becomes an “URGENT” SMS and every discount receives a “last chance” reminder, the business gradually spends the attention it worked to earn.

The 2026 EZ Texting data gives a warning here. Frequency was the most commonly reported reason for unsubscribing from business texts, cited by 40% of respondents. Irrelevant content was another driver. 

A quieter inbox is valuable precisely because it’s quieter. Brands have more to gain from protecting that position than from turning SMS into a compressed version of their email calendar.

The best SMS copy often starts with context

Compare these messages:

20% OFF TODAY! SHOP NOW: [link]

and:

Luna Coffee: Your subscriber offer ends tonight. Save 20% on your next order here: [link]. Reply STOP to opt out.

What makes the second message better is the reduction in uncertainty, not the increase in length.

The recipient can see who sent it and why the offer relates to them. There’s an obvious action if they’re interested and an opt-out if they aren’t.

Now change the scenario:

Green Dental: Reminder that your appointment is tomorrow at 2:30pm. Need to reschedule? Call us on 01234 567890. Reply STOP to opt out.

The structure changes because the job changed. There’s no promotional CTA to force into the message, and a click-through rate would tell the practice very little about its success.

Good SMS copy starts with the situation, not a template.

How do you know if an SMS campaign worked?

When you're deciding whether an SMS campaign worked, take a step back and ask why you sent it to begin with.

For an appointment reminder, fewer no-shows may tell you much more than clicks. A back-in-stock campaign could be evaluated against product visits and purchases, while a conversational follow-up may be better judged on replies.

That’s why deciding on the outcome before sending is so useful. It prevents campaign reporting from becoming a hunt for whichever number looks strongest afterwards.

Delivery still deserves attention because failed messages can indicate bad numbers or other list-quality problems. Opt-outs add another layer: a campaign can generate sales and still reveal that part of the audience found the frequency or targeting unwelcome.

You’re looking for the result and what the campaign teaches you about the next send.

How Transpond supports SMS campaigns

In Transpond, SMS doesn’t need its own separate marketing workflow.

For UK customers, it can work alongside email inside the same campaign and automation setup. You can send a standalone SMS campaign to a selected audience or add an SMS step to an Automation when a contact reaches the right point in their journey. SMS requires the Transpond SMS add-on and is currently available to UK customers. 

That creates two very different ways to use the channel:

1) If you already know when the message should go out, use a campaign

You might build an audience in Transpond, write a short promotional message and schedule it for Friday at 9 a.m. The timing comes from your marketing calendar, just like a scheduled email campaign.

2) If the timing depends on what a contact does, SMS fits more naturally inside an Automation

For example:

Contact books an appointment → wait until the day before → send SMS reminder

or:

Contact joins a list → send email → wait → send SMS if a faster follow-up is useful

or:

Contact reaches a particular stage → trigger SMS with the next relevant action

Instead of exporting contacts into another SMS platform or maintaining a separate sending calendar, the message can stay inside the Transpond workflow that already manages the rest of the journey.

Campaign or Automation?

Look at what controls the send.

• If the marketing team controls the timing, build a campaign.
• If the contact’s behaviour or journey stage controls the timing, build an Automation.

SMS can support both.

That also means you don’t need to mirror an email campaign message-for-message.

A Transpond email can handle the main message: the announcement, product images, offer details and links. SMS can then pick up at a more useful moment, for example, to remind someone that a sale ends tonight, nudge them to complete a booking or bring them back to an email they haven’t acted on. Because SMS sits alongside your existing audiences, campaigns and Automations in Transpond, you can build these follow-ups into the same customer journey rather than managing a separate messaging tool.

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SMS is valuable partly because marketers haven’t ruined it yet

Business texting is no longer a fringe channel. According to EZ Texting, 89% of respondents said they had signed up to receive texts from at least one business.

But SMS still occupies a different kind of inbox from email.

There are fewer business messages competing for attention; people tend to see texts quickly, and many SMS interactions start with something the customer has already done or requested.

AI makes this distinction even more important. Marketers can now create far more content and communications, but customers haven’t gained any more attention to give. The opportunity with SMS isn’t to send more messages simply because we can. It’s to use the channel when a short, timely message genuinely adds value.

For UK teams using Transpond, SMS can work alongside email and Automations, helping you reach customers at the points in their journey where a direct, immediate message makes sense.

Try Transpond free and see where SMS fits into your customer journeys.