Your SMS channel isn't expensive. Your setup is.
Run this split before you cut SMS spend.
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Automated SMS earned about $0.74 per send in Omnisend's 2026 Ecommerce Marketing Report.
Campaign SMS, the scheduled blast to your whole list, earned about $0.15.
Same channel. Same phones. Roughly 5x apart.
That number stopped me because it means brands have already bought into SMS. The budgets are there and the lists are growing.
But the channel is being run well below its ceiling.
The money was there the whole time and it's just sitting in the half of the channel nobody built.
The Broadcast Trap
Here's how SMS gets set up in almost every account I open.
The brand collects numbers at checkout, wires the list into their platform, and starts sending.
A launch text. A sale text. A Tuesday-afternoon promo to everyone at once.
On paper it all looks alive. The list is growing, the sends are going out, the dashboard shows revenue.
But per-send economics say that's the low half of the channel.
You're paying full price per message to reach people at a moment that's convenient for your content calendar.
The recipient didn't do anything to invite that text. So it converts the way any interruption does.
Why Triggers Win
The difference between $0.74 and $0.15 comes down to timing.
- Cart reminder lands minutes after someone loaded a cart and walked
- Back-in-stock alert lands the moment the thing they wanted becomes available
- Post-purchase text lands while the order is still top of mind
- Replenishment nudge lands right around the time the first bottle runs out
Each one fires because the recipient just did something, and the message answers a question they were already asking.
Compare that to the blast. The offer might be strong and the copy might be sharp, but the timing belongs to your calendar instead of their behavior.
You're paying the same per-send cost either way. Only one of them is showing up at a moment of intent.
Omnisend's report backs this up with the conversion data:
- Back-in-stock automations had the highest conversion rate of any automation type at 6.46%.
- SMS volume on their platform grew about 40% year over year in 2025, on top of 31% growth the year before.
Those numbers come from 150,000 brands, 27 billion emails, and 321 million SMS sent in 2025.
This is Omnisend's own platform data, so treat it as directional for your account rather than an industry benchmark. The direction is hard to argue with.
Growth like that comes from sends that keep paying for themselves.
The Audit to Run This Week
None of this requires a platform decision or a budget conversation. Pull up your SMS program and run this split. Takes about 30 minutes.
> Map every SMS send from the last 90 days into two buckets: triggered (fired by a customer action) or blasted (scheduled by you).
> Check whether the core triggers even exist in your account: cart abandonment, back-in-stock, post-purchase, replenishment. In more accounts than you'd expect, at least two of these are missing entirely.
> Pull per-send revenue on each bucket separately. Blended numbers hide the gap. The whole point is seeing the two halves side by side.
> Stop judging the channel on blast performance. If your triggered sends are earning multiples of your campaigns, the fix is building out triggers, and cutting the channel would be cutting your best-performing sends along with your worst.
Run that split and you'll know within the hour whether your SMS problem is a channel problem or a setup problem. In my experience it's almost always the second one.
Where Omnisend Fits
This is the kind of triggered email-plus-SMS setup Omnisend is built to run from one place.
Every automation in the audit above ships native in Omnisend, email and SMS live under the same roof, and the reporting already separates your triggered revenue from your campaign revenue.
So the split I told you to run is a view, no spreadsheet required.
It says something when a platform publishes the data that argues for sending less.
Final Thoughts
SMS isn't expensive. Blasting is.
The channel gets judged on its worst half because that's the half everyone builds first. Broadcasts are easy. Triggers take an afternoon of setup.
But the per-send math says the afternoon pays for itself. Run SMS as a trigger channel and the economics change without adding a single send.
The triggered half of your SMS program is either your best-kept revenue line or it doesn't exist yet.
Run the split this week, and if you're building the triggers from scratch, start inside Omnisend.
Nord Media helps DTC brands between $5M – $100M+ in revenue scale by driving profitable growth utilizing Meta, Google and Creative Strategy.
Book a call and let's see how we can help you grow 👉 book a call with me.
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