The 2018 updated Australian data on SMS open rates

We’ve supplied Australian businesses with bulk SMS services for more than 10 years, so we have a lot of faith in text messaging as a communication channel. This is verified by our customers consistently and successfully using SMS to improve their engagement rates. But there’s no substitute for quantifiable data, and data that’s specific to Australia – something that often gets missed in SMS open rate analyses. That’s why we conducted an online survey on our websites between February and March 2018, and are now able to present the most up-to-date statistics on the open rate of SMS.  From our online survey, 94% of Australians said that they read texts, which is on par with the global average we’ve seen from the combined survey data we have on our UK, Spanish, French and Irish websites.

SMS Open Rate in Australia

Compare this to the open rate of email, which is 32.4% in Australia (source), and our faith in SMS for business communication is well placed!. Within those that would read SMS, 78% responded that they open every single message they receive; and 16% of Australian respondents said they would only read texts from recognised senders. This percentage goes up to 25% for people aged 18 – 24.

                        Read every SMS                         Read SMS only from recognised senders

So if you are targeting the younger generation, or you want to boost your SMS open rate, using your brand name as the sender ID can help you to achieve that.In order to help businesses and marketers to get the most out of SMS, we’ve collated the data into different age groups to see how SMS performs among different generations. From our survey, the open rate of SMS actually reaches 100% for Australians aging from 18 to 44. For people aged 44-54, there’s a 95% of open rate on SMS. The number starts to go down slightly to 82% and 75% for the age group of 55-64 and 65+ respectively.

Open rate of SMS in different age groups

We hope this information gives you a more realistic picture of the potential of SMS. If you would like to have more information about this survey, or want to know how you could start implementing SMS into your business communication strategy, contact us now.