Most checkout audits I run show the same gap: one abandoned-cart email, firing once, and nothing after it. Then a vendor blog says SMS recovers 30% of carts and email 5%, so switch everything to texting. That stat is real and misleading at the same time.
TL;DR: SMS and email are not fighting over the same job. SMS wins open rate (near 98%) and click rate; email wins revenue per send ($2.54 to $3.65 against $0.74 for SMS) because the list is larger and costs nothing to send. The real recovery winner is both, sequenced: email for the detail, SMS for the urgency. Combined beats either one alone.
Why this matters for your store
- Shopify carts abandon at 70.22% (Baymard, 2025), so the recovery flow is often the highest-return message you own, and most stores run a third of it.
- Switching to SMS “because it converts better” on a misread number adds per-message cost and legal risk to revenue your email was already capturing for free.
- The two channels catch different buyers at different moments, so running one and skipping the other leaves money in the cart by design.
What do the SMS vs email cart-recovery benchmarks actually say?
Read across the platform reports and one pattern holds: SMS wins attention, email wins economics. These are the numbers from sources that publish aggregate data, not single-store case studies.
| Metric | SMS | Source | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 50.5% | ~98% (97% within 15 min) | Klaviyo 2024, industry |
| Click rate | 6.25% | ~36% | Klaviyo |
| Placed-order rate | 3.33% | +12% to +19% lift vs baseline | Klaviyo, Attentive |
| Revenue per send | $2.54 to $3.65 | $0.74 | Omnisend 2025, Klaviyo |
| Cost per send | near $0 | $0.01 to $0.03 | Klaviyo |
Klaviyo’s 2024 benchmark, built on more than 143,000 flows, puts the average recovery email at a 3.33% placed-order rate. SMS open rates sit near 98%, a figure every major SMS platform repeats. The eye-catching “25% to 40% SMS recovery” range you see quoted is a composite of vendor case studies, and it measures SMS working inside a combined SMS-and-email flow, not SMS on its own. Treat it as directional, not a benchmark you will hit by bolting on a texting app.
Why does SMS get opened when email sits unread?
A text lands on the lock screen. Attentive, reporting on 25 billion messages, found SMS drove a large share of revenue from a tiny share of total send volume. The open happens in minutes, not hours.
Email fights the promotions tab, the Gmail clip, and a 24-hour decay curve. A good recovery email still opens around half the time per Klaviyo, which is strong, but it is slower and noisier than a text.
So for pure urgency, a near-instant 98% open beats a delayed 50%. If attention were the only metric, SMS would win and the switch-to-SMS posts would be right.
So why does email still make more money per send?
Here is the part those posts skip. Omnisend’s 2025 data shows the average recovery email earning about $2.54 per send, and Klaviyo reports $3.65, while SMS earns about $0.74 per send.
Two reasons. Email lists run far larger than SMS lists, because email opt-in is one frictionless field and SMS opt-in is a regulated, deliberate action. And email costs effectively nothing to send, while every SMS carries a carrier fee.
That flips the headline. SMS converts a higher percentage of a smaller, hotter, more expensive audience. Email converts a lower percentage of a much larger, free one. On total recovered revenue, a mature email flow usually still does the heavy lifting, which is why ripping it out for SMS is the wrong move. That tradeoff belongs in your checkout and cart math, not in a channel slogan.
SMS or email first? The sequence that recovers the most
The winning setup runs in a specific order, not a single channel.
Send the email first, about an hour after abandonment, with product images, social proof, and the discount. Shopify’s own guidance is a multi-step email sequence at 1 hour, 24 hours, and 72 hours. Then layer SMS for the buyers who opted in: a short, urgent nudge either shortly after the first email or staggered to the next day.
Attentive’s Cyber Week 2025 data found SMS plus email lifted conversion 18.4% over SMS alone. The roles split cleanly: email carries the detail and the discount logic, SMS carries the urgency and the deadline. Run them as one orchestrated flow, suppress the second channel when the first already won the order, and cap total frequency so you are recovering carts, not training people to unsubscribe.
What SMS compliance mistakes get a Shopify store fined?
This is where I watch stores walk into real liability, and no benchmark post mentions it.
US SMS marketing runs under the TCPA. You need prior express written consent: an explicit opt-in, logically tied to the messages you will send, never a pre-checked box and never a phone number you happened to collect for shipping. You must honor quiet hours, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the recipient’s time zone, and process opt-outs fast. The penalty is $500 to $1,500 per message, which scales into a class-action-sized number quickly.
Email is lighter touch. CAN-SPAM asks for an honest header and a working unsubscribe, not prior consent. So the compliance load of SMS is another reason it sits on top of email rather than replacing it: you pay per message and carry legal weight for the privilege of that 98% open.
Does your recovery app slow the store down?
A recovery flow only matters if the cart it points back to actually loads. This is the failure I catch most on conversion audits: the recovery app’s storefront script piles onto an already heavy theme.
Klaviyo, Postscript, and the rest inject JavaScript that competes for the main thread. Stacked with reviews, chat, and popups, that pushes Interaction to Next Paint and CLS into the red on mid-tier Android, and a cart that janks on tap loses the recovered click you just paid an SMS to earn. Before you add a fourth marketing script, run your store through the App Bloat Detector and kill the heaviest offender first. The same discipline applies whether you run these tools or a subscription app: defer the script, reserve its space, lazy-init below the fold.
How to set this up this week
Three checks, none needing a developer.
- Open your email platform and confirm the recovery flow has at least two steps, not one. A single email leaves the 24-hour and 72-hour recovery on the table.
- Check whether you collect phone numbers with a real, explicit SMS opt-in. If not, that is the prerequisite before any SMS app, and getting why carts abandon right matters more than the channel anyway.
- If you run both, confirm they are one orchestrated flow with frequency caps and cross-channel suppression, not two apps firing blind at the same shopper.
The takeaway
- Keep email as the recovery workhorse: it earns more per send ($2.54 to $3.65) on a larger, free list.
- Add SMS for urgency, not as a replacement, since its near-98% open works on a smaller, opted-in audience.
- Sequence them: email first at one hour with the detail, SMS second for the deadline, because combined beats either alone by double digits.
- Get explicit TCPA written consent and honor quiet hours before you send a single recovery text.
- Audit the recovery app’s performance cost, because a slow cart kills the click you paid to recover.
Kaspian Fuad is a Shopify CRO consultant and Liquid developer who builds retention and recovery flows for DTC brands. 12 years in ecommerce, 100+ stores, Top Rated Plus on Upwork. Book a free 30-minute call if you want your cart-recovery flow and its performance cost audited.