The Numbers You Actually Want
Everyone in SMS marketing will tell you the channel "delivers incredible ROI." Not many will give you the actual numbers. Let's fix that.
The figures below are drawn from anonymised data across hundreds of BulkSMSRates customers running campaigns between Q3 2025 and Q1 2026. Where we've got specific case studies with permission to share details, we'll go deeper.
How to Calculate SMS ROI (Properly)
Before the numbers, the formula. Most people calculate SMS ROI badly — they either don't account for all costs, or they attribute too much (or too little) revenue to the SMS channel.
Full cost of an SMS campaign:
- •Message costs (segments × rate)
- •Creative time (writing, approval, A/B test variants)
- •Platform/integration costs (usually zero with pay-as-you-go)
- •Compliance cost (consent management, opt-out processing infrastructure)
For most mid-market businesses, the non-message costs are small. A 10,000-message campaign at £0.0300/message costs £323 in messages. If writing the campaign takes 2 hours at a £60 effective hourly rate, total cost is £443.
Revenue attribution:
This is where it gets tricky. Three approaches:
- 1.Direct attribution: A recipient clicks an SMS link, goes to your site, buys within 24 hours. Revenue is attributed to SMS.
- 2.Promo code attribution: SMS includes a unique code. Revenue tied to that code is SMS revenue.
- 3.Uplift analysis: Compare revenue on campaign days vs matched non-campaign days. The difference is attributed to SMS.
- •Average delivery rate: 96.4%
- •Average click-through rate: 9.8%
- •Average conversion rate (clicks to purchase): 12.3%
- •Average order value: £68
- •Average cost per campaign send: £0.0300/segment
- •Cost: £1,615
- •Delivered: 48,200
- •Clicks: 4,724 (9.8% of delivered)
- •Purchases: 581 (12.3% of clicks)
- •Revenue: £39,508 (581 × £68)
- •ROI: 24.5x
- •Average recovery rate: 6.2% of abandoned carts result in completed purchase
- •Average cost per recovered cart: £0.97
- •Average recovered order value: £94
- •Monthly SMS cost: £387 (12,000 subscribers × £0.0300)
- •Monthly bookings attributable to SMS: 34 (via booking source tracking)
- •Average booking value (table of 2): £85 (food + drinks)
- •Monthly SMS-attributable revenue: £2,890
- •ROI: 7.5x
- •8,000 lapsed guest contacts
- •Cost: £258
- •Bookings within 30 days: 22
- •Average booking value: £420
- •Revenue: £9,240
- •ROI: 35.8x
- •No-show rate drops to 6% (12 missed appointments)
- •18 additional appointments completed
- •Revenue recovered: £2,880/month
- •SMS cost: 200 messages × 2 reminders × £0.0300 = £12.92/month
- •Net monthly gain: £2,867
- •ROI: 222x
Direct attribution with UTM parameters or unique promo codes is cleanest. Uplift analysis is useful for campaigns without links. Both are more honest than "everyone who bought this month might have been influenced by SMS."
Retail and Ecommerce: The Sweet Spot
Retail and ecommerce are where SMS marketing ROI is most reliably strong. Here's why: you have a clear trigger (a sale, a product launch, a flash event), a specific call to action (shop now), and direct attribution via click-through.
Flash sale campaigns (24–48 hour window):
Across 143 retail/ecommerce customers in Q4 2025:
Working it out on 50,000 recipients:
That's not an outlier. That's the average across 143 accounts. The top decile is hitting 35–45x ROI. The bottom decile is at 8–12x, still comfortably profitable.
The variance comes from list quality, offer strength, and timing — not from the channel itself.
Abandoned cart recovery SMS:
This is one of the highest-ROI use cases we see. A customer adds items to cart, starts checkout, then leaves. 15–30 minutes later they receive an SMS: "Still thinking? Your cart at SHOP is saved. Complete your order: shop.com/cart/abc123."
Across 47 customers running automated abandoned cart SMS:
A 6.2% abandoned cart recovery rate at £0.97 cost, recovering £94 average order, is a 97x return per recovered cart. Obviously you're not recovering every cart — but even at 1,000 abandoned carts per month with 62 recoveries, that's £5,828 in revenue at £970 in SMS costs.
Hospitality: Filling Empty Tables and Seats
Hospitality — restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues — has specific SMS use cases with very clear ROI.
Restaurant last-minute availability (same-day sends):
A mid-size London restaurant chain (3 locations, ~4,000 SMS subscribers per location) runs a weekly availability SMS every Friday at 4pm for same-day and next-day availability.
Message: "ROSSIS: Tables available tonight and Saturday. Book now: rossisrestaurant.com/book — Reply STOP to opt out."
Lower than ecommerce, but restaurant margins and the nature of last-minute hospitality make this extremely efficient. The alternative — empty tables — has zero revenue.
Hotel booking reactivation:
A hotel group sends a "we miss you" SMS to guests who stayed 6–18 months ago but haven't rebooked:
The key here: hotel guests are high-value and relatively rare. A single recovered booking makes the entire campaign pay off many times over.
Healthcare: Reducing No-Shows (The ROI Is Enormous)
No-show appointment costs are staggeringly high in healthcare. The NHS estimates each missed GP appointment costs around £30. For private practices, a no-show on a £150 consultation is £150 of lost revenue and a booking slot that can't be filled.
Appointment reminder SMS consistently reduces no-show rates by 30–45%. Here's what that looks like in practice:
A private dental practice, 200 appointments/month, 15% baseline no-show rate (30 missed appointments):
Before SMS reminders: 30 no-shows/month × £160 average treatment value = £4,800 lost revenue/month.
After SMS reminders (sent 48h and 2h before appointment):
This is why appointment reminder SMS has near-universal adoption in private healthcare. The ROI is so clear that the only question is why you wouldn't do it.
The Bottom Half: What Makes SMS ROI Disappointing
Not every SMS campaign delivers 20–40x ROI. Some deliver 2–3x. Some lose money. Here's what goes wrong:
Bad lists. Bought lists, old lists with 20%+ dead numbers, lists with no segmentation — these kill ROI before you start. The first campaign will look terrible because you're paying for messages to people who either don't receive them or don't care.
Generic offers. "Check out our new range!" is not an offer. "30% off all coats this weekend only" is an offer. Generic messages get ignored, don't generate clicks, and waste list goodwill.
Wrong frequency. Over-sending is the fastest way to destroy a list. We've seen customers go from 9% CTR to 3% CTR in three months by increasing sends from 2x/month to daily. The list fatigues and opts out.
No attribution setup. Teams that can't track SMS-attributable revenue can't optimise. They don't know which campaigns worked and which didn't. Their ROI stays mediocre because they're flying blind.
Sending at the wrong time. A well-written flash sale message sent at 11pm gets opened eventually — but not when the sale is active. Timing matters.
What the Best Performers Do Differently
Looking at the top 10% of our customers by ROI, a few patterns emerge:
They segment deeply. They don't send to "the whole list." They send to "customers who bought in this category in the last 90 days."
They test constantly. Every significant send has some variation being tested. Over 12 months, the accumulated learnings compound into substantially better results.
They time with precision. They've tested morning vs afternoon, day of week, and know their specific audience's sweet spots.
They treat opt-outs as signals. A sudden spike in opt-outs means the content or frequency is wrong. They investigate immediately.
And they start with realistic expectations. Month one ROI is often 5–8x while the list is small and learning. By month six, it's typically 15–30x as the list grows and the playbook is refined.
The channel works. The question is just how well you work the channel.