Many comparisons between push notifications and SMS marketing are framed as a competition to determine which is the better channel. However, this overlooks the fact that each channel has unique characteristics and is better suited for specific marketing objectives. They should be viewed as complementary tools in a marketer’s toolbox, rather than rivals vying for the same resources.
How Each Channel Actually Delivers Messages
The delivery system you use is more important than what most marketers give it credit for because it comprises your costs, speed, and deliverability simultaneously.
SMS messages travel on cell networks. Your campaign is beamed over to carrier servers, checked for spam, then delivered to the SMS inbox on a user’s phone. It’s the old-fashioned telephone system, but it’s everywhere (in the U.S. anyway). Any mobile phone in the world can receive SMS. But the carriers are omnipresent in another way too: between you and the user. They decide what messages to block. What messages to filter. What messages to charge you more for.
Push notifications skip carrier fees entirely. They go from your server over an internet connection to the push service of a browser vendor (Apple, Chrome, Mozilla, etc.), then straight down to the device (if it’s online). Other than maybe costing you a fraction of a cent for CPU and bandwidth, nobody else gets in the way of your message. Nobody else sends you a bill.
Related Post
How Publishers Can Monetize Their Push Subscriber Base
If you have a push subscriber list, thousands or even millions of opted-in users who’ve indicated an interest in receiving ads, routing some or all of their impressions through a push ad network is a no-brainer. Ensuring they see well-targeted, high-paying ads that convert really well is going to maximize your revenue.
Also, using a large network volume to identify and optimize your most profitable segments without having to front your own dollars on split tests is a more efficient way to grow. It’s just better business.
Subscription Friction and What it Costs You in Scale
Convincing a user to subscribe to an SMS list is a big ask. With a personal phone number on the line, it’s easy to see why many people are reluctant to give those out. Most regulated SMS programs (and if you’re a marketer working with a US audience, that’s you) legally require documented prior express written consent (commonly referred to as PWEC) within the guidelines of something like the TCPA. Voice programs require the same under Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR).
Furthermore, multiple reputable programs require a double opt-in step as well, and if you’ve been to this rodeo more than once, you’ve probably found this is just asking for a low conversion rate. The more steps in the funnel, and the more friction in those steps, the smaller the list accrued at the end of it.
Web push is effectively the opposite of this. One prompt from the browser. No personal information. No form, phone, or email. One click. Opt-in rates across the industry average between 5% and 15% with the delta usually determined by the vertical and selected targeting. Sound low? Compare it to SMS on similar cold traffic. It’s not.
The Chrome Quiet UI put some pressure on this process by limiting how often and how soon you can spam a prompt to a visitor who’s not yet subscribed, and additional browsers are likely to take this route in the future. That said, it’s going to take a lot of developments like this to even out the difference.
Unit Economics: Where the Real Separation Happens
The business case becomes more evident here.
When you send an SMS, you are charged per message. This is not a coincidence in pricing, but the way the carriers’ technology operates. Short code campaigns, long code sends, MMS for rich media, all have a cost that you must pay per recipient. International routing adds complexity and cost on top of that. As your subscriber list grows, your monthly send cost increases at a similar rate. You don’t get any savings from the message itself.
But according to Gartner, SMS campaigns have open rates up to 98% and response rates of 45%. So, if you are getting that kind of engagement, those per-message costs are more than justified. The right use of SMS, a one-time, usually transactional message with a high conversion rate, is worth more than its weight in gold. For any such campaign, any money spent on a non-converted message is money saved. SMS is making you profit.
Push notifications, by contrast, have near-zero marginal cost per message once you’re on a platform. Whether you send to 10,000 subscribers or 10 million, the cost structure doesn’t scale linearly the way SMS does. For publishers building large-scale engagement loops, that’s transformative. Content distribution, promotional pushes, affiliate offers, re-engagement campaigns, all of this becomes affordable at scale in a way SMS simply isn’t.
Compliance and Legal Exposure
Violations of the TCPA can result in penalties from $500 to $1,500 per message per violation. Not per campaign. Per message. This means that an SMS program that takes liberties with consent documentation, messages re-assigned numbers, or deploys an autodialer without proper compliance is instantly exposed to significant financial risk. The SMS channel requires organizations to engage a lawyer, map out and retain all consent mechanisms and put recipients through some sort of legal diligence and registration review to make sure your clients aren’t under an order to not receive solicitations.
Push notifications aren’t a lawless channel either. GDPR and even Apple and Google’s platform guidelines apply there, too. However, the compliance surface is different. Platforms themselves enforce many of the rules about what your notifications can say and whether you can even employ a certain type of message (i.e. alerts). Users can revoke permission in a few taps. The legal risk profile is just fundamentally lower.
This doesn’t mean push is a compliance-free channel. It means the operational effort to stay compliant is considerably smaller, and the consequences of mistakes are less severe.
Rich Media and Creative Formats
A standard SMS includes 160 characters with plain text. While MMS can include images and audio, the room for creativity remains limited, the file size is restrictive, and the display of MMS can vary depending on the carrier and device.
Push notifications allow custom icons, large banner images, emojis, interactive buttons with custom call-to-action text, product images, headlines, short descriptions, and two buttons (e.g., Buy and Details) visible immediately, without the need to open the phone or computer. That’s a lot more leeway for creativity, and makes push optimal for promotional content, content campaigns, and affiliate programs.
Deliverability: Two Different Sets of Problems
Text messages are often considered to be delivered almost 100% of the time, and that’s true from a technical perspective, if the number isn’t disconnected or out of service, the message will be received. However, the risk in SMS is that campaigns using certain words, sending at high volume from flagged numbers, or following typical spam patterns can be rate-limited or blocked by carriers with no notice to the sender. Hygiene of your list there, keeping out those bad disconnected numbers and managing your complaint rate, goes immediately to deliverability.
For push messaging, it’s a different set of variables. There is no carrier deciding your fate, but operating system battery optimizations can delay or even discard notifications. Newer versions of Chrome have introduced something they call quiet notification permission prompts. And Apple users have always had the ability to receive notifications on arrival, notifications with sounds, or notifications nowhere but the notification center, thank you. Deliverability rates for push notifications come down much more to the specifics of individual devices, OS versions, and user settings than to the carrier you’re sending from.
Neither channel delivers a perfect 100% reach. The failure modes are just different.
Building a Hybrid Deployment Strategy
The channels aren’t mutually exclusive, and the best-performing programs don’t choose one over the other, they assign each channel to the job it’s actually suited for.
SMS handles high-stakes, time-sensitive, bottom-of-funnel communication. A purchase confirmation that needs to arrive in under 30 seconds. A two-factor authentication code. A delivery window alert where the user needs to act or make a decision. These are cases where the 98% open rate justifies the per-message cost, and where the personal phone number channel creates appropriate urgency.
Push handles scale, frequency, and content distribution. A media publisher sending five articles a day would bankrupt itself on SMS at any meaningful list size. The same content on push costs almost nothing per message and creates a recurring engagement loop that keeps traffic flowing to the site. Promotional campaigns, affiliate offers, re-engagement sequences, seasonal announcements, this is push territory.
A simple framework: if the user failing to see this message has a real cost – a missed delivery window, a security risk, an expired reservation, use SMS. If the goal is engagement, discovery, or low-urgency promotion, push handles it more efficiently and at a fraction of the cost.
Final Thought
The real question here isn’t about which channel is better. It’s about whether you’re using high-cost, high-compliance SMS budgets for messages that could do without it, or if you’re rather not using a scalable, low-cost push channel to its fullest potential, and instead, your SMS costs are just escalating together with your list. There’s probably one of those scenarios happening for most programs out there. The way you solve for this is getting back to what each channel is built for.
