What if I told you there’s a way to lower your customer re-marketing costs by 95%?
You’re spending £2 every time a past customer clicks one of your ads. Someone who already knows you, already bought from you, already trusts you. And the ad platforms charge you the same as they would for a complete stranger.
There’s a better way to bring them back. It costs less than 5p, 98% of recipients open it, and most read it within three minutes. It’s SMS. And when you pair it with PPC, you can create an incredibly powerful marketing machine.
The Leaky Bucket You’re Filling With Paid Clicks
PPC is an extraordinary acquisition tool. For businesses looking to get in front of people actively searching for what they sell, there’s nothing quite like it. The problem isn’t PPC itself. The problem is what happens after someone clicks.
Most businesses run paid search and social campaigns, drive traffic to a landing page, convert a percentage of visitors into customers, and then… nothing. The relationship ends at the transaction. The customer goes back to browsing, and the business goes back to bidding on keywords and audiences, hoping that same person (and thousands of others) will click again.
The economics of this approach are getting worse, not better. PPC costs across the board are climbing. WordStream’s 2025 benchmarks show the average cost per click rising 12.88% year on year, with cost per lead now sitting at £70.11 on average. And here’s the really uncomfortable part: conversion rates declined across 13 of 14 industries in 2025, while cost per acquisition rose across the same number. Whether you’re running search, social, or display, the cost of acquiring each customer is climbing. Which is exactly why making every acquisition count for more than a single transaction has never mattered more.
Meanwhile, the foundational research on retention economics hasn’t changed. Harvard Business Review’s analysis found that acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one. Bain & Company’s work showed that a 5% improvement in customer retention can drive profit increases of 25% to 95%.
Yet most businesses pour their entire PPC budget into acquisition, treating it as an expense to manage rather than an investment to optimise. They’re filling a bucket with an increasingly expensive tap, and they’ve drilled holes in the bottom.
The Channel Sitting in Everyone’s Pocket
SMS marketing isn’t new. But its effectiveness in 2026 is staggering, and most businesses still aren’t using it properly (if at all).
The numbers speak for themselves. SMS achieves open rates of 98%, compared to email’s 20%. The average text message gets read within three minutes. Response rates sit at 45%, against email’s 6%. And click-through rates on links within SMS messages average 36%, compared to the low single digits for email campaigns.
SMS marketing isn’t new. But its effectiveness in 2026 is staggering, and most businesses still aren’t using it properly.
That last number should stop you. One in three people who receive your text message click the link inside it. Try getting that from a display ad.
Attentive’s 2025 UK consumer research found that 93% of UK consumers are either already signed up for SMS programmes or open to joining. Fifty-five percent have made a purchase directly from a text message. And 78% are more likely to buy after receiving a restock notification via SMS.
The Handoff Nobody Is Building
Think about what happens when PPC does its job well. Someone sees your ad on Google, Meta, or wherever you’re running campaigns. They click. They land on your page. They buy, or they submit an enquiry. Success.
Now what?
If you’re like most businesses, the answer is email. Maybe a post-purchase sequence. Maybe a monthly newsletter. And email works, to a degree, but it’s a crowded, noisy channel where open rates have been declining for years. Your carefully crafted follow-up is competing with 120 other emails in your customer’s inbox that morning.
The missing handoff is the phone number. When your PPC landing page captures a mobile number alongside an email address (with proper opt-in, naturally), you create something powerful: a direct line to your customer that bypasses the inbox entirely. Not an ad impression they might scroll past. Not an email buried under promotional noise. A text message that lands on their lock screen and gets read in under three minutes.
This is first-party data at its most valuable. Research from BCG found that brands deploying a comprehensive first-party data strategy achieved 2.9 times higher revenue lift compared to those that didn’t. Your customer’s phone number, collected with consent through your PPC landing page, is the bridge between a one-time acquisition and a long-term relationship.
The Remarketing Tax
Without SMS (or another owned retention channel), businesses default to PPC remarketing to re-engage existing customers. Display remarketing across platforms like Google and Meta costs between £0.25 and £1.23 per click. Search remarketing is even more expensive. And those costs only apply to the small percentage of people who actually click. The rest see your ad, ignore it, and you still pay for the impression.
An SMS message costs less than 5p to send. Not per click. Per message delivered. And 98% of recipients open it.
Let me put that into perspective. Say you have 5,000 existing customers you want to re-engage with a promotional offer.
Through display remarketing, reaching those 5,000 people (assuming a generous 1% click-through rate) might require 500,000 impressions to generate 5,000 clicks. At £0.50 per click, that’s £2,500 for 5,000 interactions, many of which will bounce without converting.
Through SMS, you send 5,000 messages at 5p each (rounding up to be conservative). Total cost: £250. With a 36% click-through rate, that’s 1,800 people actively engaging with your offer. For ten percent of the cost.
You’re not just saving money. You’re getting dramatically better engagement at a fraction of the price. The remarketing tax, the ongoing cost of using paid media to talk to people you’ve already acquired, is one of the most overlooked inefficiencies in digital advertising. And SMS eliminates it almost entirely.
I’ve written before about how much a new customer should actually cost. The answer depends partly on how much revenue you can extract from that customer after the first purchase. If you have no retention channel, your customer lifetime value is artificially capped, and your allowable acquisition cost shrinks with it.
The Data Feedback Loop
The combination of PPC and SMS doesn’t just save you money on remarketing. It creates a virtuous cycle that makes both channels work harder.
Here’s how.
Your SMS list gives you direct insight into your best customers. You know who opens every message. You know who clicks. You know who buys repeatedly. That behavioural data is gold, and it feeds straight back into your PPC strategy.
The combination of PPC and SMS doesn’t just save you money on remarketing. It creates a virtuous cycle that makes both channels work harder.
Upload your highest-value SMS subscribers as custom audiences across your ad platforms (Customer Match on Google, Custom Audiences on Meta, and equivalents on other platforms), and you can build lookalike audiences from the people who actually buy from you repeatedly, not just the people who clicked an ad once. That means your acquisition campaigns target people who resemble your most loyal, most profitable customers, rather than a broad audience that might convert once and disappear.
Optimove’s research across 10,000 marketing campaigns found that multi-channel campaigns achieved a 37% higher response rate than single-channel efforts. But the combination of email and SMS specifically delivered an 88% improvement in campaign effectiveness over single-channel approaches. When you add PPC acquisition on the front end, feeding customers into a combined email and SMS retention engine, the entire system compounds.
This is what makes the PPC and SMS combination structurally different from running either channel alone. PPC on its own is linear: spend money, acquire customer, repeat. SMS on its own is limited to whoever you’ve already captured. Together, PPC feeds the SMS list, SMS maximises customer lifetime value, and the data from your best SMS subscribers improves your PPC targeting. Each channel makes the other more effective.
Why Most Businesses Haven’t Connected These Dots
If the case is this clear, why aren’t more businesses doing it?
Partly, it’s organisational. PPC and SMS typically live in different departments, managed by different teams or agencies, measured against different KPIs. The PPC team optimises for cost per acquisition. The SMS team (if there is one) optimises for open rates and click-throughs. Nobody owns the handoff between the two.
PPC and SMS typically live in different departments, managed by different teams or agencies
Partly, it’s a mindset problem. Most businesses still think of channels in isolation. PPC is for getting new customers. Email is for retention. SMS is something e-commerce brands do during Black Friday. The idea that these channels should be architected as a single system, with deliberate handoff points and shared data, requires a level of strategic thinking that most multi-channel marketing strategies don’t reach.
And partly, it’s because 95% of people aren’t ready to buy at any given moment. PPC catches the 5% who are actively searching. But without SMS, you have no cost-effective way to stay in front of the other 95% until they’re ready. You’re forced to keep paying for clicks and impressions through paid media, competing in auctions against every other advertiser in your space. SMS lets you nurture that 95% directly, for pennies, until the moment they’re ready to buy.
What This Actually Looks Like
If you’re new to both channels (or running one without the other), here’s a practical framework for making them work together.
Start with your PPC landing pages. Every conversion-focused landing page should capture a mobile number alongside email, with a clear SMS opt-in. Offer something valuable in return: a discount code, early access, or exclusive content. The incentive matters. Attentive’s UK research found that 43% of consumers will share their phone number for free shipping, and 42% for a free gift. Give people a reason to opt in.
Build a welcome sequence. Within hours of a PPC conversion, trigger an SMS welcome message. Confirm the purchase, deliver the promised incentive, and set the tone for the relationship. Remember, Stanford research found that 30% of advertising’s first-week effect occurs on day one. The window for building engagement is narrow and front-loaded.
Segment by behaviour. Not every customer gets the same messages. A first-time buyer gets a different sequence than a repeat customer. Someone who opens every message but hasn’t purchased in 60 days gets a re-engagement offer. Your SMS platform should integrate with your CRM so you can segment based on purchase history, engagement patterns, and value.
Replace remarketing with SMS. Any time you’d normally use paid remarketing to re-engage an existing customer, ask whether an SMS message would do the job better and cheaper. Promotional offers, new product announcements, loyalty programme nudges: these are all natural SMS territory, and they cost a fraction of what you’d spend on display or social retargeting.
Any time you’d normally use paid remarketing to re-engage an existing customer, ask whether an SMS message would do the job better and cheaper.
Feed data back into PPC. Every quarter, upload your most engaged SMS subscribers as custom audiences across your ad platforms. Build lookalike audiences from them. Exclude existing customers from your acquisition campaigns (you’re already talking to them via SMS, so there’s no need to pay for ads to reach them too).
Measure the system, not just the channels. The metric that matters isn’t SMS open rate or PPC cost per click in isolation. It’s customer lifetime value by acquisition source. Track how much a PPC-acquired, SMS-nurtured customer is worth over 12 months compared to a PPC-acquired customer with no retention channel. The difference will justify the investment.
The Structural Advantage
The businesses in your market that figure this out first will be genuinely difficult to compete against.
Not because they’ll have a bigger budget. But because every customer they acquire through PPC will be worth more, for longer. Their acquisition costs will be lower because their lookalike audiences will be built from higher-quality seed data. Their retention costs will be lower because SMS is orders of magnitude cheaper than paid remarketing. And their customer lifetime value will be higher because they’ll have a direct, high-engagement channel keeping the relationship alive.
Meanwhile, their competitors will keep paying ad platforms to re-rent access to customers they’ve already won. Click by click. Month after month.
PPC gets them in. SMS keeps them buying.
PPC gets them in. SMS keeps them buying. The businesses that connect those two dots will spend less, earn more, and compound the advantage every month they run the system.
It’s why we’ve partnered with Text Management, a specialist SMS provider, to offer our clients exactly this kind of integrated approach. We handle the PPC acquisition. They handle the SMS retention. And together, we build the system that makes every customer worth more than a single transaction.
