Does SMS marketing work?
A text works when three things are true. The person asked to hear from you. The message is about something specific to them. A reply has somewhere to go.
The phone is why the first two matter so much. A text sits in the same inbox as messages from people, so a relevant one gets seen. That is also why a sloppy one does damage. There is nowhere for it to hide the way a promotional email can.
When it does
The texts that earn the next send are usually operational and personal at the same time: the table is ready, the part came in, the appointment is Thursday, the shift is open. The reader can tell why they got this one and what to do, including nothing.
A reply is part of the result. Someone asks a question, confirms, or says they want the thing. Two-way is that conversation staying in one thread. If the only success you can picture is a click, you will undercount the channel, and you will write messages nobody can answer.
When it does not
It fails on a purchased list, because those people did not agree, and a lot of the numbers are wrong. It fails when every send is a generic sale. It fails when the cells in the sheet do not read as a sentence, so the text says “your multiple” where a person expected “your fence.” Formatting is that failure, caught early.
It also fails quietly when STOP starts climbing and nobody changes the next message. Opt-outs are a result, not a nuisance metric.
What to read on the campaign
Entrance puts four rates across the top of a campaign: delivery, true response rate, clicks, and opt-outs. True response rate is responses minus stops, over delivered. Stops are their own number. Delivery tells you the messages went out. True response rate tells you whether anyone other than an opt-out wrote back.
If delivery is fine and the response rate is not, the list or the message is the problem. Writing a text is the shorter fix. A new tool will not repair a list that never opted in.