At what volume does SMS become more profitable than email in Morocco? (calculator)

This conclusion is one of the most dangerous analytical illusions in E-commerce. If we look at the unit cost of sending, email will always win. But in performance marketing, what matters is not "How much I paid to send", it's "How much I paid to make a customer buy" (The Cost per Conversion / CPA).

Let's dismantle this myth with a mathematical modeling of the "Crossing Point" (Profitability Threshold) between the two channels.

The value of a message is not its transport price, it is its attention rate.

Email suffers from a massive attention deficit. Moroccan inboxes (Gmail, Yahoo) are overflowing with newsletters and spam. The opening rate of a good B2C email marketing caps at 20%. The SMS, with its aggressive notification on the locked screen, touches the 98% opening rate.

If we weight the cost by the opening rate:

• Paying 0 to reach 0 people remains a failure.
• Paying to be sure to be seen by 100% of the base forces conversion.

Let's take an E-commerce store selling perfumes in Morocco, with an average basket of 400 MAD and a net margin of 150 MAD per perfume sold.
The store targets a responsive base of 10,000 loyal customers.

Scenario 1: The “Free” Emailing campaign

• Sending cost (SaaS platform such as Mailchimp): Let's estimate the volume cost at 50 MAD.
• Opening rate (15%): 1,500 emails read.
• Click rate on email read (5%): 75 visitors to the website.
• Purchase rate (Web Conversion 3%): 2.25 Sales generated.
• Profit generated: 2.25 x 150 MAD (Margin) = ~337 MAD.

Result: It's very inexpensive to run, but it doesn't change the company's cash flow.

Scenario 2: The [Bulk SMS (Bulk)] campaign (/fr/blog/how-much-really-costs-a-campaign-of-10,000-sms-in-morocco-en/)

• Sending cost (10,000 SMS at 0.65 MAD, Starter rate with a validated Sender ID): 6,500 MAD.
• Open rate (98%): 9,800 SMS read.
• Click-through rate on the short link (12%): 1,176 visitors to the website.
• Purchase rate (Hot Web Conversion 4%): 47 Sales generated.
• Gross profit generated: 47 x 150 MAD (Margin) = 7,050 MAD.
• Net Profit (Gross Profit - SMS Cost): 7,050 - 6,500 = 550 MAD in the cash register.

Conclusion: The SMS campaign cost 130 times more than email, but still generated a higher net bank profit (550 MAD against ~337 MAD for email). SMS keeps the edge in absolute financial profitability.

SMS is not magic. It mathematically becomes loss-making (CPA higher than the margin) if:

1. The base is "Dirty" (No legal consent / CNDP): If you buy a cold base, your click-through rate (CTR) will be 0.5%. You will pay 6,500 MAD to generate 1 sale. The ROI will be abysmal. SMS is only profitable only on a very qualified list (Opt-in).
2. The product is not an “Impulse Sale”: The SMS is used to create urgency (Flash Sale, Last Minute). Selling ultra-complex B2B software via SMS makes no sense.
3. The text is too long: If your copywriter writes a text that costs 3 SMS segments to send, the base cost goes from 6,500 MAD to 19,500 MAD, devouring all your margin.

The management rule in Morocco is clear: Use (free) emailing for editorial, brand nutrition and sending PDF invoices. Use the paid SMS weapon only for urgent authentication (OTP) or end-of-month tactical closing (Hard Selling), where its "Cost Per Conversion" is mathematically the best in the industry.