SMS Marketing Analytics: 8 Key Metrics to Boost Your Campaign

If a marketing campaign underperforms, most people blame the message, or the timing, or the team, or just assume that maybe SMS marketing has lost its charm and appeal. But more often than not, it’s not the channel that’s at fault. It’s the lack of insight that can tank entire campaigns and not even offer any way for you to recover.

When you’re sending tens of thousands of texts a month, gut instinct isn’t enough. And if you’re waiting for days or weeks to get your answers, that’s way too late.

This article breaks down 8 key SMS metrics, why they matter, and how to use them to run higher-performing campaigns without relying on guesswork.

Why SMS marketing analytics matter

Undelivered messages lead directly to lost revenue. This is especially critical for OTPs, user registration flows, and welcome messages, where delivery failures directly block user access or onboarding, which means they can’t use your product or service. Even ignored promotional campaigns can damage acquisition and conversion and hurt your revenue.

As a marketer, you cannot afford to stop as soon as you see a “sent” or “delivered” status. These two metrics barely scratch the surface. While volume and deliverability do matter, performance insights are equally essential, if not more so, and often as easily overlooked.

Without proper analytics, there is no way for businesses to know which of their messages are converting and which ones are going unnoticed, left sitting in customers’ inboxes forever. Analytics reveal what works across the various audience segments, timings, tones, campaign types, and message lengths.

Regardless of how many messages you send out every day, you can’t make crucial decisions based solely on a gut feeling. Data-driven decisions are a necessity if you really want to see your SMS marketing campaigns succeed. And if you want to make changes to live campaigns instead of reacting only when it’s too late, then you need this analytical data in real time.

Detailed insights and analytics can also help justify future SMS marketing budgets to business stakeholders because you’re not just showing activity, you’re proving performance. They can help quantify the real costs and benefits.

A provider like Messente can offer you the much-needed levels of visibility, so you’re not left taking shots in the dark. The right types of analytics will help you discover and fix inefficiencies that may not be apparent at first sight. We can help you gain comprehensive insights and optimize your SMS marketing efforts and, ultimately, achieve better ROI.

8 key SMS marketing metrics to track and monitor

1. Open rate

This one’s a bit tricky in the context of SMS marketing because, unlike email or rich messaging, SMS open rates aren’t tracked directly. Salesforce expert Lukas Lunow writes that SMS doesn’t have the tracking pixels or metadata required to record an “open.” You can only get a rough idea based on other supporting metrics. Therefore, in most cases, the SMS open rate is often estimated or assumed. Sometimes, though, providers might fake this data and inflate it to give you a false sense of security regarding your campaign’s success so that you continue to use their platform.

So, while you can’t “track” open rates in the conventional sense, you still need to keep an eye out for the kind of numbers your provider claims to be collecting for you. Make sure they’re not including fabricated open metrics in their analytics dashboard. If they are, maybe it’s time to rethink your choice and switch to a more trustworthy service.

2. Delivery rate

Delivery rate tells you how many of your SMS messages actually reached your customers’ devices after they were dispatched from your end. It’s one of the most important metrics for any SMS marketing strategy, especially when you're sending time-sensitive texts like OTPs or limited-time offers and promotional campaigns.

A low delivery rate can signal bigger issues, like expired or inactive numbers, region-specific content filtering, or message formatting problems. In some cases, artificially inflated traffic (AIT) attacks can also affect what looks like successful delivery but isn’t.

Your SMS messaging provider can play a major role in determining your delivery rate. For instance, Messente ensures high deliverability through smart internal routing, fallback options, and consistently high uptime.

Bonus: Messente’s Number Lookup API filters out dead numbers before you send, saving you from wasting your budget on unreachable recipients.

3. Click-through rate (CTR)

If you’ve included a link in your SMS, the click-through rate (CTR) measures how many recipients clicked on it. This engagement metric tells you whether your message and offer were compelling enough to drive the recipient to some real action.

A high CTR usually means you’ve nailed the copy, CTA, and timing, and relevance for that specific audience segment.

To achieve ideal CTR numbers, you must test different message formats to see what sticks. You can also use the CTR to gauge the impact your personalization techniques may have. For instance, does incorporating the recipient’s name, location, or behavioral cues bring more clicks?

As with any other metric, you can’t analyze the CTR in isolation. For more meaningful insight, you need to look at conversion data beyond clicks. Clicks are good, but completed actions, such as subscribing to a package or making a purchase through that clicked link, matter more.

(With a feature called link tracking, which Messente also offers, you can monitor clicks directly within your analytics dashboard, to figure out where the clicks to a certain link are coming from.)

4. Response rate

Response rate is especially important for two-way messaging campaigns, such as surveys, appointment confirmations, or feedback requests. It shows you how many recipients replied, and how quickly.

A low response rate might point to campaign fatigue, an ineffective CTA, or even that SMS wasn’t the right channel for that audience. It could also be a sign that something else needs adjusting, such as the timing, tone, or message structure.

To properly evaluate engagement and eagerness, you can track the percentage of replies received within different time periods, e.g., 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 24 hours. You can also use response rate in combination with segmentation to spot hidden patterns and better understand your audience and their behaviors.

Messente threads two-way SMS conversations inside your inbox, where you can easily review what worked and what didn’t. This makes it easier to refine your two-way messaging strategy and improve engagement over time.

5. Opt-out rates

The opt-out rate tells you how many people are unsubscribing from your messages. It is one of the clearest indicators of how your audience feels about your content.

A growing opt-out rate might mean that you’re sending too many texts over too short a time, your messaging is too generic or not interesting, or that your campaign is just not relevant to the people you’re sending it to.

You can leverage opt-out trends to clean up your SMS subscriber list and focus on better segmentation. Delivering fewer, better-targeted messages is always more effective than blasting the wrong content to everyone.

Trying to dodge high opt-outs and not handling them transparently, promptly, and according to user consent preferences may lead to regulatory scrutiny, especially in high-risk regions such as the EU. With Messente, we value compliance and thus place the utmost importance on consent management. Opt-out tracking becomes very simple via our dashboard. It allows you to gain visibility into what’s working for you and helps you stay fully compliant while keeping churn under control.

6. Contact list growth rate

The contact list growth rate shows how quickly your SMS subscriber base is expanding. If more people are opting in, it means your messaging, timing, and value proposition are working. It’s also a useful way to gauge whether your past wins are part of a strong streak or just one-off successes.

Messente allows you to track opt-ins directly, so you always have visibility into what’s driving growth and when things start to slow down. A flat or declining list growth rate might indicate that either your opt-in forms or opportunities aren’t compelling enough, or you’re not offering any value. It could also point to missed opportunities across channels, e.g., maybe you’re not promoting SMS sign-ups in your email campaigns, website, socials, or post-sales flows. Either way, this metric keeps you accountable and focused on long-term consistency towards subscriber growth.

7. Conversion rate

Conversion rate is one of the most meaningful performance metrics. It shows you how many recipients actually followed through and completed the action you wanted after engaging with your SMS message. This action could constitute anything, from making a purchase to subscribing to a newsletter. In a way, it measures the end goal of the entire campaign and is one of the clearest indicators of success.

This KPI becomes even more valuable when looked at alongside your CTR. A high click-through but low conversion rate could mean your landing page wasn’t persuasive enough, or that the text message and the webpage weren’t aligned. Maybe the CTA was unclear, the offer didn’t land, or the page didn’t load well on mobile. Conversion data helps you connect those dots.

Tracking conversions also helps you identify which message templates, CTAs, or offers are consistently delivering results and which ones are underperforming. It’s key to calculating ROI not just for the campaign as a whole, but per message, audience segment, and even delivery region.

8. Return on investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) links your SMS campaign spend directly to the outcome, which could be generating sales revenue, capturing new leads, or some other goal. Calculating your ROI gives you a clear picture of how much return you’re getting for every cent you’re spending on your SMS strategy. It’s an essential metric for marketing teams because it can help justify future SMS marketing budgets, particularly to non-marketing stakeholders.

Tracking ROI also helps you compare different types of campaigns and figure out which ones are most successful and delivering the most value, and which ones aren’t. If you know your ROI, you can better optimize the timing, frequency, regional targeting, and routing for your SMS messages.

Messente is built to help you improve ROI. We help keep costs in check by offering pricing transparency, with no hidden fees and no hefty platform or per-user costs. You also get transparent reporting, useful cost optimization tools, and full clarity on exactly what you’re paying for.

You can use Messente’s SMS ROI calculator to run your own numbers and make important marketing decisions accordingly.

When SMS messages fail to hit the target

Just because an SMS shows as “delivered” or “sent” doesn’t mean it actually reached the user or that they saw it.

A message can pass through various networks or systems but still get silently filtered. And there can be many reasons behind that, such as if the content includes multiple or shady links, mentions sensitive or banned words or phrases, or simply doesn’t match local regulations. Wrongly targeted or poorly structured messages can also lead to messages being ignored or blocked without any obvious warning signs.

Threats like artificially inflated traffic (AIT), which are essentially fake spikes in message volumes, can further distort your numbers, making it seem like campaigns are performing better than they are, while quietly draining your budget.

Some providers won’t tell you when this happens. They either hide delivery failures behind vague stats or might take days, or sometimes even weeks, to respond to your panicked inquiries while avoiding accountability. In the meantime, you keep losing money.

Messente gives you transparency in the form of detailed delivery stats, fast support, and proactive AIT protection. We also verify Sender IDs, guide you on content, and optimize delivery routes to make sure your messages don’t just get “sent” but actually land.

How to use SMS analytics to improve future campaigns

Identifying patterns

The right kind of SMS marketing analytics can help you spot what’s actually working, including the hows and whys behind it.

An SMS platform like Messente can give you all the data in the world. But it’s on you to use that data to identify patterns that correlate with your success. For instance, is there a specific time of day when your messages are more well-received than usual? Are shorter messages driving more clicks? Which CTAs are converting, and which ones fail to make an impact? Compare how different message copies perform across demographics and look at which campaigns led to the highest opt-in or response rates. This will also make it easier to flag badly performing templates and retire them before they drag down future results.

Messente’s dashboard gives you access to historical data across all your campaigns, so you can track these trends over time and build on what’s already proven to work.

Segmentation and personalization

Use analytics to understand what kind of messaging actually works for each segment of your audience. You can group users by behavior, past responses, purchase history, or any custom criteria that matter to your business. This allows you to send tailored messages instead of blasting one generic campaign to everyone.

Use the results of your audience segmentation activities to send personalized messages for more meaningful results. You can’t just be blasting off campaigns blindly. You need to make sure you’re sending the right messages to the right people at the right time. With the tagging functionality built directly into the Messente dashboard, managing and refining these segments can easily become part of your regular workflow.

Choosing the right channels and frequency

Analytics can help you fine-tune both your message timing and frequency. You don’t have to go radio silent, but you also shouldn’t overdo it. Use opt-out trends and engagement data to figure out when and how often your audience wants to hear from you.

Do your customers react better to messages where you create a sense of urgency, or do you think they dislike it when you pressure them like that? Are they more likely to act after the first message, or only after the third reminder? These are the kinds of questions your data can answer. The goal is to send SMS marketing campaigns with a purpose based on what actually works.

Campaign optimization

Your analytics aren’t just there to look at after an SMS campaign has ended. They should actively shape what happens during.

Undelivered or low-performing messages can tell you a lot. Maybe the timing was off, the copy didn’t land, or the CTA missed the mark. Use A/B testing to experiment with different templates, schedules, and message formats. If a segment isn’t engaging with a campaign like you expected, adjust the messaging and re-send it.

Also, with Messente’s real-time data and insights, you don’t have to sit around clueless or wait until it’s too late. You can weed out underperforming links, offers, or templates mid-campaign. And if something’s clearly not working, pause it. Don’t wait for the budget to run out to make a change.

Best practices for getting actionable SMS insights

• Don’t wait until you notice a particular campaign “not getting results” to check your dashboard. Take advantage of the real-time access you get to critical data. Conduct regular checks (e.g., weekly throughout a campaign) to catch issues early and stay proactive.

• Set clear, concrete, and meaningful goals. Simply making sure that your open rates or CTR are high isn’t enough. Go deeper and track conversions, signups, and actual purchases to measure real impact.

• Create internal benchmarks for each key metric and review trends over fixed time periods to stay consistent.

• Run regular data hygiene audits. Use delivery data to identify and clean out inactive or invalid numbers that drive up costs and drag down performance and ROI.

• Keep an eye out for anomalies. Sudden spikes from the same IP or repetitive behavior could point to fraud. Messente offers built-in security mechanisms to detect and flag suspicious activities. Use them well!

• Share your SMS marketing insights. Train non-marketing team members, such as those from product, CX, and sales teams, to read SMS data so everyone’s aligned on the agenda.

• Use insights from delivery reports and cost breakdowns to make smarter decisions and optimize your SMS marketing budget over time.

Wrapping up: Why Messente’s SMS analytics stand out

Messente’s SMS analytics go way beyond surface-level summaries. You get full transparency with detailed delivery stats, complete message history, and performance insights. And all this data is available at both the campaign and individual message levels. The dashboard is built for marketers, so there’s no need to loop in IT, and you can export reports easily whenever needed.

Account setup is also super simple yet efficient. It includes unlimited users and accounts, which is ideal for teams looking to scale fast or manage complex operations without ballooning their costs. There are no bloated interfaces, no surprise platform fees, and no bare-minimum basics locked behind enterprise paywalls. Plus, you get support responses in under an hour when something needs immediate attention.

Test out Messente’s online SMS gateway and get the best out of your campaign analytics efforts.