Email costs almost nothing to send. A thousand emails costs less than a single bottle of water. So a fair question, if you run a business in Nigeria, is why bother paying for SMS at all. The honest answer is that the two channels do different jobs, and the cheaper one is not always the one that reaches your customer.
The open rate gap is enormous
Start with the number that matters. SMS open rates sit far above ninety percent, and most of those opens happen within minutes. Email open rates in Nigeria, across most industries, struggle to reach a fifth of that. The message you paid almost nothing to send is the message most people never see.
The reason is simple. A text message arrives on the lock screen and is hard to ignore. An email lands in a crowded inbox, often filtered into a promotions tab the recipient never opens, competing with dozens of others that arrived the same day.
Data and reach are not a given
Email assumes your customer has a smartphone, an active data connection, and the habit of checking their inbox. A large share of Nigerian phone users have none of those reliably. SMS needs none of it. Any phone, on any network, with no data at all, receives a text. For reaching the widest possible audience, nothing matches it.
Where email still wins
This is not an argument that email is useless. For long content, receipts, statements, newsletters, anything with formatting or attachments, email is the right tool and its low cost is a real advantage. If you are sending a monthly update with images and links, do it over email and save your SMS budget.
The mistake is using email for things that are urgent or transactional. A delivery code, an appointment reminder, a flash sale ending tonight, a payment confirmation. These need to be seen now, and email cannot promise that.
A simple way to decide
Ask one question of every message: does it need to be seen in the next few minutes?
If yes, send SMS. Order confirmations, OTPs, time-sensitive offers, reminders, anything where a missed message costs you a sale or a no-show.
If no, send email. Newsletters, detailed updates, anything long or visual where being seen today rather than this minute is fine.
Most businesses that get this right use both. Email for depth, SMS for reach and urgency. The cost difference between them is real, but so is the reach difference, and a message nobody opens is the most expensive message of all, no matter how little you paid to send it.
The bottom line
SMS is not competing with email. It is competing with being ignored. For the moments that matter most, when a customer absolutely has to see what you sent, the few naira per message is the cheapest insurance you can buy.