Push vs SMS vs Email: Cost and Effectiveness of Customer Communication Channels

If you run a café, gym, salon, or retail shop, you make the same decision every day: how to reach a customer so they come back. Push notifications, SMS marketing, and email are the three most popular customer communication channels, but they differ dramatically in cost and effectiveness. Push from a loyalty card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet is free and lands straight on the lock screen. SMS you pay for per message. Email is often the cheapest per send, but fewer than one in five recipients open it today. In this article we break down all three channels and show when each one makes sense.

Three customer communication channels: a quick comparison

Before we dig in, look at the hard numbers. Each channel has a different unit cost, a different reach, and a different real-delivery rate. What looks cheap on the invoice can be the most expensive per customer who actually saw the message.

• Push notifications (Wallet): cost €0 per message, lock-screen visibility around 100%, no send limit.
• SMS marketing: cost roughly €0.02–0.05 per message, open rate around 90%, but every campaign is a real expense.
• Email: cost a fraction of a cent per message, open rate 15–22%, click rate often below 3%.
• Takeaway: push combines zero cost with SMS-level visibility and email-level scalability — the only channel without that trade-off.

SMS marketing: a cost that grows with every customer

SMS has one huge advantage — almost everyone opens it, usually within minutes. The problem is that SMS marketing is a tax on scale. The more loyal customers you have, the more you pay to reach them. With a base of 2,000 people and four campaigns a month at €0.03 per message, you spend close to €240 a month just on sending. And that's before anyone buys anything.

• Cost scales linearly with your base — loyalty success paradoxically raises your bill.
• The 160-character limit forces abbreviations and links that lower trust and click-through.
• Marketing-consent and GDPR requirements mean part of your base is off-limits for SMS.
• Great for urgent, one-off blasts — poor as a steady weekly channel.

Email: cheap to send, expensive in attention

Email was the default retention channel for years and still makes sense for longer content — newsletters, recaps, multi-product offers. But inboxes are overloaded today, and promotions tabs hide most messages from businesses. Average open rates in food service and local services run 15–22%, and real click rates rarely top 3%. That means out of a 2,000-person list, 300–440 actually see your promo, and maybe 60 click it.

1. 1Sending is nearly free, which tempts you to treat email as a mass channel.
2. 2But low open rates mean you pay with customer attention, not money — and that attention keeps shrinking.
3. 3Deliverability depends on domain reputation; one bad blast can land you in spam for months.

Wallet push notifications: zero cost, full visibility

This is where the loyalty card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet pulls ahead. When a customer adds the card to their phone, you can send push notifications that appear on the lock screen — exactly where an SMS lands — but completely free and with no limit. You update their points balance, remind them of a reward waiting to be claimed, or send a deal of the day, and the message reaches everyone holding the card, whether you have 200 or 20,000 customers. The cost of reach doesn't go up by a single cent.

• Zero unit cost — you send to your whole base without watching a meter.
• Near-100% lock-screen visibility, with no promotions tab and no spam filters.
• The card is always at hand — the customer doesn't hunt for an app or dig through an inbox.
• Win-back and birthday automations fire on their own, so the channel works without you lifting a finger.
• Push pairs with the rewards shop and referrals — one notification drives the next visit.

How to stack the channels: a practical strategy for local business

The best results come not from one channel, but from a smart stack of three. Push handles daily, free contact and forms the retention backbone. Keep SMS for rare, genuinely urgent moments where every minute counts. Use email where you need room for longer content. The rule is simple: send push by default, and switch on paid channels only when they add something push can't.

• By default: push notifications for points balance, rewards, daily offers, and win-back automations.
• Exceptionally: SMS for same-day, time-boxed actions (e.g. last hours of a promo, a salon booking).
• Supplementally: email for monthly recaps, menu launches, and longer brand stories.
• Measure cost per real reach, not per send — that's when push's edge becomes obvious.

If you pay for every SMS today and watch your email open rates slide, there's a simple path to cut your communication cost to zero without losing visibility. Loyalif gives you loyalty cards in Apple and Google Wallet with no app, free push notifications to the lock screen, win-back and birthday automations, a rewards shop, referrals, and a web scanner for the counter. Set up your program in minutes and see how much stays in the till once your main customer communication channel stops generating invoices.