Ask an Indian consumer which messages they never ignore and the answer is usually the same: their bank alerts, their OTPs and the text telling them a delivery is arriving today. SMS remains the channel of certainty in India. Whether it is also an effective marketing channel depends on how you use it.
Where SMS works best in India
Reaching everyone with a phone
SMS needs no app, no data pack and no smartphone. For businesses serving customers in smaller towns, older customers or anyone on a basic handset, it is often the only channel guaranteed to arrive. DataReportal’s Digital 2025 India report put active cellular connections at about 1.12 billion, well above the 806 million internet users it counted in the same period.
Time-critical service messages
Appointment reminders for clinics, fee-due alerts for schools and coaching centres, cash-on-delivery confirmations for D2C brands and EMI reminders for lenders all depend on being read quickly. These typically go as service or transactional messages under TRAI’s rules, and they are where SMS earns its keep.
Short, urgent offers
A flash sale that ends at midnight, the last day of a festive offer or a restock of a sold-out item suit 160 characters well. The customer does not need to read much; they need to know now.
Where SMS is weaker
- DND filtering. Promotional messages are scrubbed against the National Customer Preference Register, so a share of your audience may be unreachable for marketing.
- Template rigidity. Every message must match a template registered on DLT. Quick copy changes the night before a campaign are not possible.
- Trust. Indians receive a high volume of promotional texts and many have learned to treat unknown senders with suspicion. A recognisable registered header matters.
- Space. There is no room for product images, detailed terms or multiple offers. That is email’s job.
SMS plus email: the combination that works
The most effective Indian campaigns use each channel for what it does best. A typical festive-season flow looks like this:
- Email the full Diwali catalogue with images and personalised picks to your opted-in list.
- Two days later, send a short promotional SMS to contacts who did not open, with one clear link.
- On the last day of the sale, send an email reminder to clickers who did not buy.
- After purchase, send delivery updates by SMS and the invoice by email.
Mailpro keeps email and SMS contacts together, so you can build this kind of flow without exporting lists between tools. You can personalise each SMS with the customer’s name or order details and send through the online SMS gateway.
How to measure effectiveness
Judge SMS on outcomes rather than impressions:
- Delivery rate: how many messages reached handsets. Mailpro’s SMS statistics show delivery status per number.
- Click-through: use a tracked short link and compare with email clicks for the same offer.
- Conversion per 1,000 sends: the fairest way to compare SMS with email, since costs per message differ.
- Opt-outs: a spike tells you the frequency or relevance is off.
In Mailpro’s own customer survey, users rated SMS deliverability 9.8/10. Your own figures, measured on your own list, are what should decide your budget.
Language and timing
A message in the language your customer uses at home can outperform an English one, but remember that Hindi or other Indian-script SMS uses Unicode and fits fewer characters per message. Keep promotional sends within daytime hours IST, when operators allow them, and avoid clustering them on the busiest festival days when everyone else is sending too.
The verdict
SMS is highly effective in India for service messages and for short, time-sensitive offers sent to people who agreed to receive them. It is less effective as a broadcast channel for cold audiences. Set it up properly on DLT, use it alongside email, and measure it honestly. The setup steps are on our SMS marketing in India page, and texting vs email compares the two channels in more depth.