Text messages have a 98% open rate
Outdated Confidence: high
Source found and quoted correctly, but old enough that the market has changed.
- Commonly cited as
- "SMS has a 98% open rate (vs 20% for email)"
- True origin
- Mobilesquared (for SinglePoint) — Conversational Advertising (white paper)
- Type
- Stat check: A widely repeated statistic traced back to its origin.
- Year
- 2010
- Data as of
- 2010
- Last checked
- What the source says
neither datapoints represent an accurate reflection of today's world of mobile messaging.
- Method & sample
- 2010 white paper; the author firm said in 2022 that its latest data suggests 55% of SMS are read and 100% are viewed. SMS has no standard open tracking.
- Drift between quote and source
- Metric: a 'read' estimate quoted as a measured open rate
- Date: the publisher itself withdrew it as current
- Interest
- Commissioned by an SMS-messaging vendor.
Safe rephrasing
Mobilesquared's 2010 estimate of 98% SMS read rates is withdrawn by its author; its 2022 data suggests about 55% are read.
Sources we opened
Machine-readable: /api/claims/sms-98-percent-open-rate.json · Last checked 2026-10-16