The famous 98% SMS open rate is hard to trace. The data you can check still favours a text for club RSVPs. Here's what holds up.
It's Wednesday afternoon. The wine tasting is on Friday, the caterer wants a final headcount by tomorrow, and your RSVP email went out ten days ago. Twenty members have replied. You know at least forty will turn up.
So you start the chase: a reminder email, a few phone calls, a note on the noticeboard. Anyone who has run a club event RSVP knows this week. The question is whether a different channel would make it shorter.
You've probably seen the claim that texts get a 98% open rate and email gets 20%. I build AI chat and text agents for clubs, so that number would suit me nicely. I tried to trace it anyway. Here's what I found, and what I think actually holds up.
Where the 98% number comes from
The figure is usually credited to Gartner: SMS open rates "as high as 98%" and response rates of 45%, against 20% and 6% for email. Plenty of vendor blogs repeat it, and the ones that link a source point to a Gartner article called "Tap Into the Marketing Power of SMS".
That link now redirects to Gartner's homepage. I couldn't open the original, so I can't tell you how it was measured, what year the data is from, or who was surveyed. That's a problem, because a text doesn't report back when it's read the way an email can. An "SMS open rate" is mostly an estimate.
So I'm not going to use it. Here's what I could check.
What the data you can open actually shows
Email isn't dead, and its open numbers are fuzzy too. Mailchimp's email marketing benchmarks put the average open rate across its users at 35.63% and the average click rate at 2.62% (data last updated December 2023, campaigns with at least 1,000 subscribers). Mailchimp itself warns that Apple's Mail Privacy Protection can inflate opens, so treat that open rate as generous.
A same-source comparison favours SMS. Klaviyo runs both email and SMS for the same pool of more than 183,000 customers, which makes its numbers a fairer side-by-side than most. In its 2026 benchmarks, the average SMS campaign click rate is 5.6%, against 1.69% for email campaigns. That's roughly three times higher for text.
Two honest caveats. Klaviyo's customers are mostly online shops, not clubs, and a click on a sale link isn't the same as a member replying "count me in". Notice too that Klaviyo doesn't publish an SMS open rate at all. It reports clicks and orders, the things it can measure.
Your members almost all carry a phone that can text. Pew Research's 2025 mobile fact sheet found that 94% of U.S. adults aged 65 and over own a cellphone, and 97% of those aged 50 to 64 do. That matters for clubs, where a lot of members are in exactly those age groups.
So I can't tell you members "don't read email". The defensible version is smaller: texts tend to get acted on more than email, and nearly every member can receive one.
Why it matters for your club
An RSVP is a tiny task. That's exactly why it slips. An email asking "will you be joining us Friday?" lands between a bank statement and a newsletter, gets opened, gets mentally filed under "later", and later never comes.
A text works differently. It arrives where people already answer their kids, their friends and their golf partners. Replying takes one line: "Yes, 2 of us." There's no form, no link, no password for the members portal.
For the person running events, that difference is the whole week. Fewer replies means more chasing, a guess at catering numbers, and a member who turns up to find the room full. More replies means a real headcount by Thursday.
How RSVP by text works in MemberX
MemberX is the part of AtomicX built for private clubs, and it does its work by SMS. Here's what it actually does today, based on our help docs:
- Members RSVP by text. A member writes "Put me down for the wine tasting, 2 of us". The AI checks the event's capacity, counting guests, and confirms. When the event is full, it says so.
- Members manage their own RSVPs. They can text "what have I RSVP'd to?" or "cancel my RSVP for Friday".
- Events come from your website. Point MemberX at your events page or its calendar feed (.ics) and it imports events on a schedule, without duplicates.
- Club questions get answered. Add short entries like dining room hours or parking, and the AI looks them up when members ask.
- You can text the right people. SMS blasts go to all opted-in members or one interest group, now or at a scheduled time. Every blast ends with an unsubscribe line, and members who reply STOP are switched off automatically.
And your team stays in control. Staff can add or cancel any RSVP themselves, get an email whenever an RSVP is created, changed or cancelled, approve new member signups, and take over any conversation.
What it won't do yet: it doesn't send automatic reminders, and it doesn't handle dues or renewals. If you need those, I'd rather you hear it from me now than in a demo.
The bigger pattern
None of this means you should stop emailing members. Email is still the right home for the newsletter, the AGM papers and the menu with photos. Some members genuinely prefer it, and texting needs their consent first, which is why MemberX only sends blasts to members who opted in.
The point is matching the channel to the job. Long reads go by email. Quick yes-or-no questions, like "are you coming Friday?", belong where people answer quickly.
And be wary of any statistic that sounds too clean, including the ones vendors like us would love to quote. A 98% that nobody can source is less useful than a 5.6% you can check.
Want to see how text RSVPs would work for your next club event? Book a 20-minute demo and we'll set one up using your own events page.