Shoppers read Viber five times as often as email.

We compared each store with itself: its Viber messages against its own emails, in the same months. Viber came out ahead in almost every store we compared, on orders per message and on revenue per message. The result is statistically significant.

The difference is attention. At the median store, 74% of Viber messages were read and 12% were clicked. For email it was 14% and 2%. Once a shopper clicked, there was no clear difference in how often they ordered.

Viber goes to a smaller audience that opted in, and stores use it differently from email. So part of the gap is how it is used. That is why we also compare the two inside the same flows.

Some flows send both an email and a Viber message, for example after an abandoned cart. There the two were credited with a similar number of orders per message: about 10 per 1,000 emails delivered and about 9 per 1,000 Viber messages sent.

Counting only Viber messages delivered, Viber came out ahead in most flows, but not by a statistically significant margin. Viber was credited with 41 orders for every 100 credited to email (last touch). Only a holdout group can show how many of them are extra.

Viber prices depend on the message type. At the 2026 prices stores pay per message through Releva in Bulgaria, a transactional message, such as an order or delivery update, costs 53% less than an SMS. A promotional message costs 670% more. In our data 71% of Viber messages were promotional, so the average Viber message cost about 460% more than an SMS.

Viber shows who read the message and who clicked. The SMS these stores sent rarely carried a tracked link, so we could not credit orders to SMS. SMS delivery reports were not consistent enough to compare delivery either.

At the median store about 9 in 10 Viber messages were delivered. The practical setup uses both: Viber first, and SMS when a message isn't delivered on Viber.

We priced every Viber message by its type and set it against the revenue from the orders credited to it, month by month. Automations, the messages triggered by what a shopper did, were credited with about 16 euros for every euro. Priced as promotional messages, they would still be credited with about 5.

One-off promotional blasts take 91% of what stores spend on Viber. They were credited with 1.4 euros per euro, and with less than their cost at the median store. A store that keeps 30% of each sale needs about 3.3 euros per euro to break even. Automations cleared that in almost every store that used them, blasts in few.

Email costs far less per message, so it returns more per euro. Viber doesn't replace it: at the median store Viber was credited with 1% of revenue, against 6% for email. In the stores that sent Viber in both years, Viber orders rose about 55% against the 12 months before.

Meta ads can reach shoppers who don't know the store yet. Viber reaches people who already opted in. So the fair question is what each is credited with per euro, counted the same way: as orders in the store.

Counted that way, Meta ads were credited with about 3.8 euros of revenue per euro at the median account. At the median store, Viber automations were credited with more and one-off Viber blasts with less. In the stores that used both in the same months, neither won consistently. Only 8% of the Meta spend whose campaign names we could read was named as retargeting, so we could not measure retargeting on its own.

The two often reach the same shoppers. From 15 January to 31 March 2026, 53% of the orders email and Viber closed after a click came after a visit from a Meta or Google ad in the 30 days before. That was 23% from a Meta ad and 40% from Google Ads. For orders none of these channels was credited with, it was 31%.

Many orders that messages closed followed a visit from an ad. Read The Meta Ads Report 2026

Stores. Online stores in Bulgaria that use Releva, a statistically significant sample. Real estate and service businesses that send Viber are left out, because they have no online orders to count.

Period. Viber, email and SMS: 1 October 2024 to 29 September 2026. Ad visits before an order: orders from 15 January to 31 March 2026, when visits from ads were recorded reliably. Flows that send both channels: October 2024 to September 2026.

Same-store comparison. Each store's Viber messages against its own emails in the months it sent Viber. We report the median store and test store by store whether Viber beats email. The result on orders and revenue per message is statistically significant.

Counting. An order counts for a message when it includes an item from that message (last touch, as each store sets its attribution). It must also carry the campaign that sent the message, in the month of sending or the month after. The same rule applies to email. It removes credits that stayed on a message long after it was sent. The flow comparison uses plain last-touch credits. In the ad-visit analysis, an order counts as closed by email or Viber only after a click on it, and messages are counted before ads. None of this is a controlled test.

Meta. Each store's own Meta reports, read-only, for ads shown in Bulgaria, from stores that connected their Meta account to Releva. Store-side Meta figures use only the months when stores' source tracking worked: October 2024 to June 2025 and May to September 2026.

Prices. Each Viber message is priced by its type, transactional or promotional, at the 2026 prices stores pay through Releva, on the higher of two bases (billed when sent or when delivered). Revenue is converted from leva month by month. Prices change, so we publish only ratios and percentages.

Currency. Revenue in leva until 31 December 2025 is converted at the fixed rate of 1.95583.

Who made this. Releva sends the Viber, email and push messages in this study and runs some Meta audiences for these stores. Almost all the Meta spend we looked at is the stores' own campaigns.

Privacy. No store is named, and we never show store revenue or prices.