2024 SMS Marketing Benchmarks: What Good Actually Looks Like

2024 SMS Marketing Benchmarks: What Good Actually Looks Like

Benchmarks without context are just numbers. This guide provides the 2024 SMS benchmark data alongside the context you need to know whether your numbers indicate a real problem, a channel-specific pattern, or an opportunity to improve.

Core Metric Benchmarks

Open Rate

• Industry average: 95–98%
• Good: 97%+
• Concerning: Below 90% (usually a delivery issue, not a content issue)

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

• E-commerce: 15–30%
• Restaurants/Food: 12–22%
• Health & Fitness: 10–18%
• SaaS/B2B: 8–14%
• Nonprofit: 10–20%

If you're below the low end of your industry range, the issue is usually messaging relevance or list quality — not channel performance.

Conversion Rate (clicks that become purchases)

• E-commerce: 8–15%
• Restaurants: 25–45% (high because the "conversion" is a reservation, low friction)
• Health/Fitness: 5–12%

Opt-Out Rate per Campaign

• Acceptable: 0.2–0.5%
• Concerning: Above 1%
• Alarming: Above 2%

High opt-out rates are the clearest signal that your list doesn't want what you're sending, you're sending too frequently, or your consent quality was poor.

List Growth Rate (monthly)

• Early stage (under 1,000 subscribers): 20–50% monthly
• Mid stage (1,000–10,000): 5–15% monthly
• Mature stage (10,000+): 2–8% monthly

Revenue Per SMS Sent

• E-commerce average: $0.09–$0.18 per message sent
• Top performers: $0.30+
• Below $0.05 suggests a segmentation or offer relevance problem

Industry-Specific Benchmarks

E-commerce

Abandoned cart sequences show the highest performance: 12–20% recovery rate on SMS sequences vs. 3–5% for email-only. Flash sale SMS campaigns drive 3–5x normal-day revenue on average.

Restaurants

Slow-night fill campaigns have some of the highest ROI ratios of any SMS use case — investment of $0.03–0.05 per message against a $40–80 average dinner ticket. Even a 2% conversion rate on a slow-night SMS to 1,000 subscribers generates 20 new covers.

Health & Fitness

Renewal reminders sent 7 days before membership expiration convert at 35–55%. Class availability notifications drive 15–25% same-day sign-up rates.

What Changed in 2024

10DLC adoption matured. By mid-2024, nearly all US A2P SMS traffic on long codes operates on registered 10DLC. Brands that hadn't registered saw delivery rates drop significantly. Registered senders saw improved delivery stability.

Carrier filtering tightened. AI-driven spam detection became more aggressive. Campaigns using promotional language similar to known spam templates saw click rates drop not because of audience change but because messages weren't reaching phones.

List quality became more important. As the cost of SMS rose slightly (due to 10DLC fees and increased campaign registry costs), the economics of sending to cold, unengaged lists worsened. Brands that clean lists quarterly outperform those that don't by 40–60% on revenue per send.

Using Benchmarks to Set Goals

Don't treat benchmarks as ceilings. They're averages that include poor programs dragging down the numbers.

A realistic improvement roadmap:

• Month 1–3: Focus on delivery rate. Hit 97%+ before optimizing anything else.
• Month 3–6: Optimize click rate through A/B testing copy and timing.
• Month 6–12: Layer in segmentation and personalization to improve conversion rate.
• Month 12+: Optimize revenue per subscriber and reduce opt-out rate through frequency management.

The brands consistently beating benchmarks by 2–3x share one characteristic: they treat SMS as a relationship channel, not a broadcast channel.