RCS Marketing ROI: What the Performance Data Actually Shows (and Where Smart Banners Fit In)

Every email marketer is watching RCS right now. Apple added support in iOS 18 in September 2024, RCS traffic on Infobip’s platform grew 550% globally that year, and the engagement numbers are hard to ignore: 3 to 7x higher click-through rates than SMS, 80% conversion rates on business campaigns, and read rates above 70%. For brands already running smart banners in email, the question is obvious. Can the same personalization playbook that drives performance in email extend to rich messaging channels like RCS and MMS?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is more interesting, because the data reveals something counter-intuitive about why RCS actually outperforms MMS. It is not the channel features driving the conversion gap. It is the creative and trust layer sitting on top of those features. That distinction matters for any CRM team thinking about where to invest next, and it maps directly to what email as a performance channel has already proven: the quality of the personalization layer determines whether a message converts, regardless of the pipe it travels through.

With average ecommerce ROAS falling to 2.87 in 2025 (down across 13 of 14 industries, per Upcounting) and customer acquisition costs climbing 40 to 60% since 2023, brands need every owned channel working harder. RCS is emerging as one more owned-media surface where personalized smart banners and dynamic content images can generate measurable returns without the rising CPM tax of paid media.

What RCS and MMS Actually Are, and Why 2024 Changed the Equation

RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the protocol replacement for SMS. It runs over IP instead of the legacy SS7 network, which means it supports high-resolution images, interactive carousels, verified brand sender profiles, read receipts, and suggested-reply buttons, all inside the native messaging app on a phone. No app download required.

MMS is the older multimedia layer on top of SMS. It supports images, but file sizes cap around 300KB, and messages arrive from an unknown number rather than a verified brand profile. The user experience is closer to getting a postcard from a stranger than a message from a brand you trust.

The inflection point was Apple’s iOS 18 release in September 2024, which added RCS support to iPhones for the first time. Before that, RCS was Android-only. After it, the addressable audience effectively became every smartphone user. Sinch’s 2025 State of RCS report found that RCS usage grew 111% during BFCM 2024 compared to the prior year. Juniper Research projects active RCS users will reach 3.8 billion by 2026. The channel is no longer experimental.

The Performance Numbers: RCS Engagement vs. Email and SMS

The raw engagement data on RCS is striking. According to Sinch’s report, 90% of rich media messages are opened within 15 minutes, and users engage with RCS content for up to 45 seconds. Business campaigns using RCS messaging have shown an 80% conversion rate. CTR runs 3 to 7x higher than rich SMS.

But here is the number that should make email marketers pay attention. In Infobip’s holiday A/B tests, comparing MMS to RCS rich cards using the same images, text, and links, brands experienced a 60 to 70% higher conversion rate with RCS. As James Brown, North American Director of Strategic Partnerships at Infobip, noted: “That’s conversions, not just clicks.”

The lift did not come from the channel capability itself. Both MMS and RCS showed the same creative. The difference came from verified brand presence and frictionless interactive elements that removed the “should I trust this?” moment degrading MMS engagement. Brown explained it this way: “The branded and verified experience of RCS inspires buyer confidence, reducing hesitation. Rich cards pique interest with interactive visuals and relevant offers. Prospective customers arrive on your website already engaged, resulting in stronger purchase intent and better outcomes.”

For context, CM.com’s data shows RCS CTR ranges from 15 to 30% (with exceptional cases hitting 51%), compared to SMS at 4 to 7% and email under 2%. Dotgo reports that cost per click for RCS is approximately 14x lower than SMS on equivalent campaign objectives, because fewer messages are needed to reach a target conversion.

How the Email Personalization and Smart Banners Playbook Extends to RCS

If you have been running personalized email content, you already understand the core principle at work in RCS performance: the creative layer is the performance driver.

Zembula’s Smart Banners produce a 13.6% average click-to-conversion rate in email, compared to the 2.5% industry baseline for the full email. That gap exists because smart banners render personalized, brand-quality imagery at the moment of open, pulling in behavioral signals like cart contents, browse history, and loyalty status. The same principle applies to rich messaging. A generic promotional image in an RCS rich card will underperform a personalized one, just as a static hero image in email underperforms a smart banner powered by real-time data.

The mechanism is the same across channels. Personalized creative rendered at request time outperforms static or generic content regardless of the underlying delivery protocol. Best practices for improving ROAS in email, like using behavioral data to personalize every touchpoint, translate directly to RCS strategy.

This is why the conventional RCS conversation, which focuses almost entirely on channel features (carousels, read receipts, verified senders), misses the bigger story. Features explain the CTR lift. They do not fully explain the conversion lift. The conversion gap closes because verified brand presence plus personalized creative removes the trust deficit that causes MMS drop-off.

Where Zembula Smart Banners Fit in an RCS and MMS Strategy

Zembula is not an RCS sender. It does not need to be. The sender platforms (Sinch, Infobip, Twilio, Bird) handle delivery. Zembula handles the personalization and creative quality layer that determines whether the message actually converts.

Here is how it works technically: Zembula’s smart content image URL renders personalized content at the moment of open in email, and at the moment of message delivery in RCS rich cards and MMS. A single image URL, embedded inside an RCS rich card, pulls real-time data (cart items, loyalty tier, local inventory, countdown timers) and renders a brand-quality personalized image for each recipient. The sender platform handles the plumbing. Zembula handles the creative intelligence.

This sender-platform-agnostic approach means you can work with whichever delivery provider fits your stack. The personalization layer sits on top, not inside, the messaging infrastructure. That is the same architecture that makes smart banners work across ESPs in email: one URL, one rendering engine, personalized output everywhere.

For brands already using Zembula in email, extending to RCS is not a rebuild. It is a new surface for the same personalization engine. Behavioral signal data (cart, browse, loyalty) powers the RCS creative the same way it powers email smart banners. And click-to-conversion measurement applies to RCS content blocks the same way it applies in email.

Measuring Rich Messaging ROI with Smart Banners Metrics

One of the biggest problems with SMS and MMS marketing has been measurement. Delivery receipts are unreliable. Open rates are assumed, not measured. Attribution is rough.

RCS changes this. The protocol supports deterministic delivery reporting, read receipts, and click tracking. As Klaviyo’s help documentation points out, RCS click rates may actually appear lower than SMS in raw data because RCS experiences far fewer bot clicks, making RCS CTR the cleaner signal. Their recommendation: focus on conversion rate (placed order rate), customer average value, and revenue per recipient as true performance metrics.

This is the same measurement philosophy Zembula applies to email. The platform’s click-to-conversion (CTC) metric tracks what happens after someone clicks a smart banner, all the way through to purchase. That same CTC measurement framework extends to RCS content blocks. You are not measuring opens or impressions in isolation. You are measuring the full funnel from personalized creative impression to revenue.

For the CMO or VP Growth who is evaluating where to reallocate budget from rising CAC, this measurement parity matters. RCS becomes a performance marketing channel with the same attribution rigor you expect from paid ads, but operating on your owned audience, using first-party identity, and generating privacy-durable measurement. With Meta CPMs up 20% YoY and Google CPCs climbing 12.88% YoY, every dollar shifted from paid to owned channels compounds.

What RCS Means for Your Channel Mix and Your Budget Conversation

RCS is not replacing email. It is adding another owned-media surface where personalized content performs. The right framing for your channel strategy is additive, not substitutional.

Email remains the highest-ROI owned channel for most ecommerce brands, and smart banners inside email are the fastest way to increase revenue per send without increasing send volume. SMS and push notifications serve their own use cases for time-sensitive alerts and re-engagement.

RCS fits into the stack as a rich messaging layer for moments where visual, interactive content drives action: abandoned cart recovery with product images and one-tap checkout, post-purchase follow-up with dynamic order status, loyalty program engagement with personalized reward carousels. Casas Bahia, a major Brazilian retailer, generated 6.2x higher ROI from RCS compared to other conversational channels. Club Comex saw a 10x increase in CTR and 115% revenue growth when moving promotional campaigns from SMS to RCS.

The budget conversation with your CMO should center on this: owned channels with first-party data and deterministic measurement are structurally underpriced relative to paid channels where iOS ATT limits visibility to 40 to 60% of conversions (per Ruler Analytics). Email and RCS share that structural advantage. Every incremental dollar you move from paid to owned, and every incremental point of conversion you squeeze from personalized smart banners across those owned channels, improves your blended CAC without feeding the ad platform tax.

Vibes found that their customers using RCS see 3x lift in engagement and 30% more revenue versus similar campaigns sent via SMS/MMS. The market projected to grow from $2.87B in 2025 to $10.93B by 2031 at 25% CAGR, according to Pinnacle. Early movers who build the personalization infrastructure now will compound that advantage.

Key takeaways

• RCS delivers 3 to 7x higher CTR than SMS and 60 to 70% higher conversion than MMS in A/B tests using identical creative, per Infobip’s 2025 Messaging Trends data.
• The conversion lift comes from trust, not just features. Verified brand presence and interactive elements remove hesitation. That maps to the same dynamic driving smart banners performance in email.
• Zembula’s smart content image URL works across channels. A single personalized image renders at open time in email and at delivery time in RCS rich cards, powered by the same behavioral data (cart, browse, loyalty).
• RCS measurement supports performance marketing rigor. Deterministic delivery, read receipts, and click tracking give you attribution parity with paid channels, but on an owned audience with first-party identity.
• The personalization layer is the performance driver, not the pipe. Brands already running smart banners in email can extend the same engine to RCS without rebuilding their personalization stack.
• Start with high-value use cases. Abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase updates, and loyalty engagement are the natural first moves for RCS, with SMS fallback for non-RCS devices.