Every café owner eventually asks the same question: when I want to bring customers back, do I email them, text them, or send a push notification? The instinct is to pick one. The better answer is to understand what each channel is for, because they have very different costs, very different open rates, and very different tolerances for how often you use them.
This is the honest comparison — real numbers, what each costs, and a simple rule for which message goes down which channel. It is written for an independent café or coffee shop owner, usually on Square.
The three channels at a glance
| Channel | Cost to send | Typical open/read rate | Needs | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheapest — by subscriber count or bundled in a subscription | ~40% opened | An email address | Newsletters, stories, longer offers | |
| SMS | Per message — adds up fast at volume | 90–98% read, usually within minutes | A phone number + opt-in | Time-sensitive, high-value offers |
| Push notification | Free to send once the app is installed | Varies widely (single digits to mid-teens) | A branded app + opt-in | Frequent, relevant nudges to app users |
Read that table as three tools, not three competitors. The expensive channel (SMS) gets read; the cheap channel (email) gets ignored more often; the free channel (push) needs you to have an app first. Each is the right answer for a different job.
Email: cheap, roomy, easy to ignore
Email is the workhorse. It is the cheapest channel per message, it gives you room for a story or a photo, and almost every customer has an address. The trade-off is attention: across industries, the average email open rate sits around 40%, which means more than half of a send is never seen.
That is fine for what email is good at — the weekly “what’s new” note, a seasonal menu reveal, a longer loyalty update. It is a poor fit for “we’re slow right now, come in for a deal,” because a chunk of the list won’t open it until tomorrow.
On Square, email marketing is part of the Square Marketing add-on (it requires a Square Plus or Premium subscription), with unlimited email sends included in the subscription rather than charged per message. That makes email’s marginal cost effectively zero once you’re subscribed — its real cost is the subscription and the attention tax.
SMS: expensive, but it gets read
Text messaging is the opposite trade. Businesses consistently report SMS read rates of 90–98%, usually within minutes of sending — nothing else comes close. When a message genuinely has to be seen now, SMS is the channel.
The cost is the catch. SMS is billed per message, so it scales directly with your list size and frequency. On Square, text marketing comes with the marketing subscription — Square Plus includes 500 texts/month (then ~3¢ each), and Square Premium includes 2,500 texts/month (then ~1.5¢ each), with picture (MMS) messages counting as three texts. Send a single offer to 2,000 customers and you have used most of a month’s allotment in one push.
The discipline SMS demands: reserve it for genuinely time-sensitive or high-value messages. A slow-Tuesday two-for-one, a new seasonal drink launch, a “your order is ready” alert. Text too often with low-value blasts and customers opt out — and SMS opt-outs are usually permanent.
Push notifications: free to send, but you need an app
Push notifications land on a customer’s lock screen and cost nothing per message to send. There is no per-text fee, no per-subscriber email bill — once a customer has installed your app and granted permission, you can message them for free, as often as is reasonable.
The two catches are real and worth stating plainly:
- You need a branded app. Push is delivered through an installed app. No app, no push — your only channels are email and SMS.
- Open rates depend on opt-in and relevance. Push open rates swing widely; contextual, well-timed notifications perform several times better than generic blasts, and direct open rates can sit in the single digits for untargeted sends. Push rewards relevance more than any other channel.
Because the marginal cost is zero, push is the best channel for frequent, repeat nudges to your most loyal customers — the ones who cared enough to install your app. For the deeper playbook on this specific channel, see push notifications for cafés.
A worked cost example
Numbers make the trade-offs concrete. Take a café with a 2,000-person customer list and assume it sends four promotional messages a month to everyone. (The figures below are illustrative, to show the shape of the cost — confirm current rates for your plan and region.)
- Email: Bundled into the marketing subscription with unlimited sends. Four sends to 2,000 people: no per-message cost beyond the subscription. Roughly 800 opens per send at a ~40% open rate.
- SMS: 4 × 2,000 = 8,000 texts/month. On a Premium plan including 2,500 texts, the other ~5,500 bill at ~1.5¢ = ~$83/month in overage on top of the subscription. But ~1,840 reads per send at a 92% read rate.
- Push (app users only): Say 600 of the 2,000 have installed your app. Four pushes to 600 people: $0 in send cost. Open rate is the variable — a relevant, well-timed push to engaged app users meaningfully outperforms a generic blast.
The pattern: email reaches everyone cheaply but quietly; SMS reaches almost everyone loudly but at a cost that scales; push reaches your most committed customers for free, if you’ve earned the app install. None of these is “best” in isolation.
The simple rule: match the message to the channel
Stop choosing a channel and start choosing per message:
- Newsletter, story, seasonal reveal, monthly loyalty update → Email. Cheap, roomy, no urgency.
- Time-sensitive or high-value offer everyone must see → SMS. Expensive, so use it sparingly and make it worth the text.
- Frequent, relevant nudge to loyal app users → Push. Free, direct, rewards relevance.
Used together, they layer: a new seasonal latte gets an email to the whole list (awareness), a push to app users on launch day (your warmest audience, free), and one SMS only if you’re running a genuine limited-time deal worth interrupting someone for.
Why push changes the economics over time
Here is the strategic point. Email and SMS both have a cost that scales with your audience and frequency — email through the subscription tier, SMS through per-message billing. Push does not. Once a customer installs your app, the marginal cost of reaching them again is zero, forever.
That is why owning an app channel compounds: every regular you convert from “on my email list” to “has my app installed” moves from a metered channel to a free one. Over a year of repeat messaging, that difference is exactly the kind of thing that shows up in customer lifetime value — you are spending less to bring the same customer back more often.
The bottom line
For a café, the answer is rarely one channel. Email is your cheap, low-urgency broadcast; SMS is your expensive, high-read emergency channel; push is your free, direct line to the customers who like you enough to install your app. Match each message to the channel that fits it, and lean toward moving regulars onto push over time because it’s the only channel that doesn’t get pricier as you grow.
The free, owned push channel only exists if you have a branded app. That is what Tany provides for cafés on Square: a branded iOS and Android app plus web ordering, with self-running loyalty and built-in push, live in about a day for $99 CAD/month per location — turning your most loyal customers into a channel you can reach for free.