As a non-profit communicating with their audience is essential, and recently they started using sMS messaging. They want to know: which metric is essential to monitor in SMS marketing to understand recipient engagement?

The delivery rate of messages is essential to monitor in SMS marketing because it directly indicates how many of your messages successfully reached your recipients' devices. A high delivery rate means your messages are getting through, while a low rate suggests issues like invalid numbers or carrier blocking, preventing your communication from reaching its intended audience. Without a good delivery rate, other engagement metrics become irrelevant as the messages aren't even being seen. Recipient's device type, time spent on SMS, and zip code distribution of recipients are less critical for initial engagement assessment; device type and zip code are demographic or technical details, and "time spent on SMS" isn't a standard or easily trackable metric for SMS.