You have a product drop going out to 12,000 subscribers. You can send a plain text with a link, or you can send an MMS with the hero shot of the product embedded right in the thread. The image version obviously converts better — people can see the thing. But it also costs more per send. The question nobody actually does the math on is: how much better does it have to convert to earn back the extra cost?
Full disclosure: I work for ReadySMS, so I'm going to use our pricing to run the numbers. The method works with any provider's rate card — plug in your own.
The cost gap, stated plainly
A single SMS segment is 160 GSM-7 characters. MMS on most carrier routes is billed at roughly 3x a text segment — think of it as three segments' worth of cost to carry the image payload. It's not an exact universal multiplier across every route and every carrier, but 3x is the honest working number for planning, and it's the one I'll use here.
On ReadySMS Standard, a segment is $0.02 plus the $0.0045 carrier pass-through, so $0.0245 all-in. That pass-through is billed transparently as its own line item, not baked into a rounded rate — here's why that matters.
So per recipient:
| Message type | Cost per send (Standard) |
|---|---|
| 1-segment SMS | $0.0245 |
| 2-segment SMS | $0.0490 |
| MMS (image) | ~$0.0735 |
The gap between a tidy one-segment text and an MMS is about $0.049 per recipient. On a 12,000-send drop, that's roughly $588 extra to send pictures instead of links. Not huge — but not free, and it scales with your list.
Why not just link to the product page?
The plain-link camp has a real argument. A link costs one segment (if you keep the copy tight), it drives traffic to a page you control and can track, and the product photo lives there anyway. So why pay 3x?
Two reasons the image sometimes wins:
- The tap-through you save. A link asks the subscriber to leave the thread, wait for a page load, and then see the product. Every one of those steps sheds people. An embedded image removes the "is it worth tapping?" decision — they already saw the thing.
- The link-filtering risk. Public shorteners get carrier-filtered, which quietly kills deliverability. If you're leaning on bit.ly to keep your text to one segment, you may be trading cost for lost sends. A branded domain fixes that but eats characters.
The honest framing: the image doesn't replace the link — good MMS drops still include a link. The image buys you a higher click-through to that link. So the real comparison is incremental cost vs. incremental conversion lift.
The revenue-per-send math
Here's the model. For any drop:
Revenue per send = conversion rate × average order value (AOV) × gross margin
The MMS earns its keep when its extra revenue per send beats its extra cost per send:
(CVR_mms − CVR_sms) × AOV × margin > $0.049
Let's rearrange to find the conversion lift you need. Assume a 60% gross margin (adjust to yours). The breakeven lift in conversion rate is:
required lift = $0.049 ÷ (AOV × 0.60)
Run that across AOV bands:
| AOV | Extra cost/send | Margin (60%) $/order | Breakeven CVR lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| $25 | $0.049 | $15.00 | 0.33 percentage points |
| $50 | $0.049 | $30.00 | 0.16 pts |
| $100 | $0.049 | $60.00 | 0.08 pts |
| $200 | $0.049 | $120.00 | 0.04 pts |
Read that carefully. At a $100 AOV, MMS pays for itself if it lifts your conversion rate by eight-hundredths of a percentage point — e.g. from 3.00% to 3.08%. That's a nothing lift. A product image almost certainly does more than that.
At a $25 AOV, you need a third of a point — from 3.00% to 3.33%, an 11% relative improvement. Still very achievable for a strong hero image, but no longer automatic.
Where the picture actually loses
The math above assumes MMS lifts conversion at all. It doesn't always, and there are three spots where paying 3x is a waste:
- Low AOV + low margin. A $12 impulse product at 40% margin gives you $4.80 per order. Your breakeven lift climbs past a full point. If your image only nudges CVR by half a point, you're subsidizing pixels.
- Restock / operational texts. "Your item is back — [link]" doesn't need a photo. They already wanted it. Save the MMS budget for back-in-stock spikes that get expensive at scale.
- Text-only wins on urgency. A flash-sale countdown ("2 hrs left, 20% off, [link]") converts on scarcity, not visuals. The image adds cost and load time to a message whose job is speed.
There's also a segment-math trap. If your text copy is already spilling into a second or third segment — which happens fast once you add a branded link and a discount code — the cost gap between "text" and "MMS" shrinks. A 3-segment SMS at $0.0735 all-in is the same price as MMS. At that point the image is nearly free, and the crossover flips entirely. We worked through the exact length where MMS gets cheaper than multi-segment SMS if you want that boundary in detail.
A worked drop, both ways
Say you're launching a $79 accessory to 12,000 subscribers. 60% margin, so $47.40 per order.
Plain SMS (1 segment), assume 2.5% CVR:
- Cost: 12,000 × $0.0245 = $294
- Orders: 300 → revenue at margin: 300 × $47.40 = $14,220
MMS with hero image, assume 3.1% CVR (a 0.6-pt lift, realistic for a visual product):
- Cost: 12,000 × $0.0735 = $882
- Orders: 372 → revenue at margin: 372 × $47.40 = $17,633
The MMS costs $588 more and returns $3,413 more in gross profit. Net gain from switching to the image: about $2,825 on one drop. The extra send cost is noise against the conversion lift once AOV clears ~$50 and the product is genuinely visual.
Flip the AOV to $22 and the same 0.6-pt lift produces only 72 extra orders at ~$13.20 margin = $950 in extra profit, against $588 in extra cost. Still positive, but the cushion is thin — one bad creative and you're underwater.
A simple decision rule
You don't need to model every send. Use this:
- AOV × margin ≥ ~$30? MMS almost always pays for itself on visual products. Send the image.
- AOV × margin between ~$10 and $30? Send MMS only when the product photo is the selling point (apparel, jewelry, food, anything you buy with your eyes). A/B test it — here's a framework.
- AOV × margin under ~$10, or the text is operational/urgency-driven? Stay on SMS with a clean branded link.
- Copy already spilling to 3 segments? MMS is roughly cost-neutral — use the image.
And regardless of type, keep the compliance layer on: registered 10DLC for ecommerce, automatic STOP handling, and quiet-hours enforcement don't care whether you sent a picture or a link.
The practical takeaway
MMS costs about 3x a text segment — roughly $0.0735 vs. $0.0245 all-in on ReadySMS Standard. That gap is real but small in absolute terms, and it's dwarfed by conversion lift the moment your AOV clears the mid-double-digits. The break-even conversion improvement at a $100 AOV is under a tenth of a percentage point; a product image clears that without trying. Below ~$25 AOV, or on operational and urgency-driven sends, the picture stops paying for itself and you should send a tight, branded link instead.
If you want to run your own list size and AOV through the numbers, the cost calculator will do the per-send arithmetic, and the pricing page has the current segment rates laid out with the carrier pass-through shown separately — so you can plug in real figures instead of my worked ones.