GoHighLevel SMS vs Email: Which One Wins

Typical SMS open rates run near 98%, according to Twilio's own benchmarking.

Email tells a very different story. SendGrid, Twilio's email division, found most campaigns landing well under a fifth of that, across more than five trillion emails sent in 2022.

Anyone weighing GoHighLevel SMS vs email for an actual campaign is really choosing between near-certain delivery and a channel most contacts routinely skip past.

That gap looks decisive once you read the caveat behind it. SMS has no real open-tracking pixel the way email does.

The 98% figure comes from delivery and response signals rather than a direct measurement. That's why marketers get pointed toward click-through and response-rate tracking for text campaigns instead of an open number nobody can actually confirm.

GoHighLevel SMS vs Email, by the Numbers

Email gives you more to measure, even if less of it gets opened. The same SendGrid benchmark report puts the average unique open rate at 19.09%, with a median closer to 15.75%.

Both click and bounce rates follow a similarly steady pattern, far lower across the board than most marketers assume. Click rate averages 4.48% with a 2.01% median, while bounce rate holds near 1.06% on average.

Timing matters on the email side in a way it simply doesn't for text. Emails sent between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. saw unique opens running noticeably higher than off-hours sends, and Monday outperformed every other weekday.

Read that table honestly and SMS wins on speed, not proof. Email wins on measurement, not attention. Neither row makes the other channel optional.

Why email still earns its place in a GoHighLevel workflow

GoHighLevel's own documentation shows the platform leaning into that measurement advantage rather than ignoring it.

Smart Send, built into HighLevel's email campaign tools, studies roughly two months of a sub-account's recipient engagement, opens, clicks, and other events, to pick the single best send hour for that audience.

It needs at least 1,000 emails delivered before it trusts its own model, and it widens the window automatically if an hour doesn't have enough data yet.

Text has no equivalent signal to train a model on. A workflow automation build that leans on email for the data-rich parts of a campaign and SMS for the time-sensitive parts plays to each channel's actual strength.

Running both channels from one GoHighLevel workflow

GoHighLevel's SMS tools split into two types. Bulk SMS sends one message to a selected group of contacts, useful for a single announcement.

Workflow SMS fires automatically when a specific event happens, a form submission or a booked appointment, so it becomes part of a longer sequence rather than a one-off blast. Drip mode spreads a larger send across smaller batches instead of firing everything at once.

Before any of that reaches a US contact, the sub-account needs A2P 10DLC registration completed. Contacts under opt-out or Do Not Disturb status get excluded automatically rather than sent to anyway.

We've covered what that 10DLC registration actually involves separately, since it's a real gatekeeping step, not a formality you skip.

Once registration and consent are sorted, the build is a sequence: email carries the detail and the offer, and a follow-up SMS workflow catches whoever needs a nudge sooner than their inbox allows.

Our guide to GoHighLevel SMS marketing costs and our walkthrough of GoHighLevel bulk email limits go deeper into each half. If the sequencing itself is the part you'd rather not own, that's the kind of build our GHL setup and configuration work handles.

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