The honest version of the email problem is not that open rates fell. It is that the open rate stopped meaning anything. A message that gets opened in a promotions tab four days late, on a laptop, by someone triaging 200 unread items, has technically been opened and has practically not been read.
Where email still wins
- Anything long. Contracts, detailed quotes, itemised invoices, onboarding documents.
- Anything the customer needs to find again in six months. Inboxes are searchable archives. Message threads are not, really.
- Anything with an attachment that matters.
- Cold outreach, where you have no prior relationship and no consent to text.
Where messaging wins outright
- Read hours to days later, if at all
- Competes with 200 other unread items
- Filtered into tabs you do not control
- Replies are slow and formal
- Great archive, poor interrupt
iMessage
- Read in minutes, usually on a lock screen
- Competes with your customer's actual friends
- No spam tab — but also no second chances
- Replies are fast and conversational
- Poor archive, excellent interrupt
That last line is the whole decision rule. Use email when the customer will want to find it later. Use messaging when they need to act now. A confirmation for tomorrow at 2pm is not an archive document — it is an interrupt, and putting it in an inbox is a category error.
The reply asymmetry
Ask a question by email and you get an answer in a day or two, written carefully, from someone who had to context-switch to write it. Ask the same question by text and you get an answer in four minutes, often one word, from someone standing in a queue. For operational questions — can we still make Thursday, is the grey one fine, do you want the extended warranty — the four-minute answer is worth more than the careful one.
Fast replies mean someone has to be there
The moment you text customers, you have created an inbox with an implied response time of minutes. If nobody is watching it, you have made your service worse, not better. Decide who is on it before you send the first message. Two-way texting covers staffing it.
Use both, deliberately
The pattern that works: text the interrupt, email the record. The reminder goes out as a message with a tagged link. The full invoice, the warranty terms and the receipt go to the inbox. Neither channel is asked to do the other's job, and the customer gets both in the place they expect it.
The one thing you must not do is duplicate everything into both. That is how you teach someone to ignore both. Pick the channel per message type and hold the line.
And tag both. If your email tool tags campaign links and your texts do not, your reports will quietly attribute every text-driven sale to email or to nothing at all. UTM tagging for text messages is the fix.
Next step
Generate a tagged link for whatever you send next with the UTM builder, see what this looks like in your industry, or compare the services that can send it on the providers page.