SMS click-through rate vs 7.14% email
click-to-deliver rate on Mighty Hikes SMS
cost savings switching SMS to Dotdigital
Macmillan Cancer Support is one of the UK’s largest charities, providing physical, financial, and emotional support to people living with cancer. With around 15 internal teams running fundraising and engagement campaigns, their marketing operation is complex, cross-functional, and always busy.
Alice French, Email Marketing Manager, and Michelle Escobar, Email Marketing Executive, sit within the Strategic Engagement Planning team, making sure every message lands.
Great content, wrong channel
Macmillan had been email-first for years. Supporters going through fundraising campaigns like Brave the Shave and Mighty Hikes received automated journeys full of useful content like:
- Event reminders
- Fundraising nudges
- Good luck messages
- Post-event follow-ups
The problem? Some of these emails were landing at exactly the wrong time. For Mighty Hikes, the good luck and well done emails were the lowest-performing messages in the entire journey. Supporters were out on the trail with no signal, or too busy on event day to open their inbox. Event packs weren’t being read. Post-hike photos weren’t being downloaded.
Meanwhile, one team had been experimenting with SMS through a separate provider. “There was no reporting and no way to see what supporters were receiving across channels. so that’s when we started looking into the Dotdigital offer,” Michelle explains.
Making SMS count
Alice and Michelle took a phased approach, with one guiding principle: every SMS has to earn its place.
“The email world is part of that trust building before we’re just sending texts,” Alice says.
Consolidating SMS into Dotdigital
Step one was moving existing SMS into Dotdigital. The switch delivered a 22% cost saving per message, and for the first time, the team could see everything a supporter was receiving across email and SMS in one place.
Brave the Shave: proving the value
The team ran a controlled A/B test. Within seven days of signing up, if a supporter hadn’t started fundraising, those with a mobile number were split 50/50 between receiving an SMS nudge or not. Those without a number got the same test via email. The wording was kept as close as possible to keep it fair.
SMS hit a 45% click-through rate versus 7% for email. Based on the control group, supporters who received and engaged with the SMS also showed a higher likelihood of starting fundraising and exceeding their target compared to the non-SMS group. It’s worth noting this is a small sample and the SMS and email audiences aren’t directly comparable, but the directional signal was strong enough to build on.
Mighty Hikes: replacing the weakest links
For Mighty Hikes, they replaced the lowest-performing emails entirely with SMS. Because supporters provide their mobile number as part of their fundraising registration details, the team were able to reach them via SMS at exactly the right moment. The good luck text now goes out two days before the event, pointing supporters to everything they need to know for their hike. The well done text goes out the day after, linking to event photos they can download and share.
Click-to-deliver rate: 53.19%, the highest-engaging SMS across all of Macmillan.
“We’d converted the lowest performing emails to some of the best performing content,” Alice says.
Spreading across teams
Other teams across Macmillan noticed. Michelle built a bank of templated SMS copy backed by performance data, so teams could adopt the channel with confidence.
The Legacies team, Macmillan’s biggest income stream, added an optional mobile number field to registration forms and now sends SMS reminders minutes before webinars and the day before in-person events. Both hit around 50% click-to-deliver rates.
“People forget, they see the email afterwards and miss the webinar completely,” Michelle explains. “The SMS reminder is just perfect timing.”
You would text your friend to say good luck on the day, and we’re able to nurture that kind of relationship with our fundraisers. People weren’t giving that feedback about the emails, even though we were sending them. They do give that feedback about the SMS.
Alice French, Email Marketing Manager, Macmillan Cancer Support
The right message, in the right place
Brave the Shave:
SMS click-through rate of 44.88% vs 7.14% for email. Based on the control group, SMS recipients showed a higher likelihood of starting fundraising and exceeding their target, though the sample size is small and the two groups are not directly like-for-like.
Mighty Hikes:
53.19% click-to-deliver rate, highest-engaging SMS across Macmillan. Supporters now reading event packs and sharing post-hike photos on social media.
Legacies:
~50% click-to-deliver rates on webinar and event reminders.
Consolidation: 22% cost savings moving SMS to Dotdigital, plus full cross-channel reporting for the first time.
Everything so far has been operational; reminders, nudges, event logistics.
Marketing SMS is next.
Until now, Macmillan’s CRM integration with Dotdigital only synced email unsubscribes, because it was built before SMS was on the table. That meant there was no way to manage SMS marketing consent at scale.
Dotdigital’s integration with Apteco FastStats has changed that, giving the team a route to sync consent both ways and making marketing SMS a real possibility. It’s firmly on the 2026 roadmap.
“Now that we have the FastStats integration, we should be able to actually make those improvements,” Alice says. “Watch this space.”