Ask the internet whether to text or email a review request and you get the same pair of open-rate figures on every page, always in the vendor's favour. We went looking for where those figures come from and could not find a primary source behind them, so we deleted them from our own blog rather than keep repeating them.
This page has no channel statistics in it. What it has instead is the part a vendor blog leaves out: what each channel demands of you before it will send anything at all, what the message can carry once it does, and what information comes back afterwards.
What each channel needs before it sends
Email you can start today. You need a sending domain that is set up to prove the mail is yours, so that mailbox providers do not quietly file your requests as junk. You also need every commercial message to carry a working unsubscribe path and a real postal address, which is what the rules on commercial email in the US require. That is a footer, and it is not optional.
Text you have to apply for. In the US, a business sending application-to-person messages from a standard number registers first: the brand and the campaign are both submitted, reviewed, and approved before carriers will pass the traffic. This is A2P 10DLC registration, and until it clears, texts either do not send or do not arrive.
That asymmetry is the practical difference, and it is the reason email is the default review-request channel in ReviewKit today while SMS sits behind carrier approval. A comparison that skips it is comparing a channel you have against one you have applied for.
Consent is not the same question on each side
Emailing a customer you just did work for sits comfortably inside normal business practice. Texting that same person is held to a stricter standard of prior consent, and the consent has to be theirs rather than inferred from a list you bought.
In practice that means collecting the mobile number as part of the job, from the customer, with a plain sentence about what you will use it for. Cold texting people who are not your customers is not a grey area, which is why we do not do it and do not build a way to do it.
Both channels need an exit that works. A text has to honour STOP. An email has to honour the unsubscribe link, including the one-click version the mailbox itself offers. Honouring means the next send actually checks, not that the link exists.
What the message can carry
A text is one line and a link. There is no subject line to be judged on, no images, no layout, nothing to scroll past. The link is effectively the entire message, so the wording around it is about tone rather than persuasion.
An email has room for context, a subject line, your business name where the customer will recognise it, and the footer the rules require. Every one of those is also another place for the reader to stop before reaching the link. Room is not the same thing as advantage.
There is a compatibility point underneath this. A review link opens a Google page that expects a signed-in account. On a phone, tapped from a text, that account is often already signed in. Tapped from a desktop mail client, it may not be, and the customer meets a sign-in screen instead of the stars. What they actually see is stepped through in how to leave a Google review.
What comes back is different, and mostly worse than you think
Opens tell you very little on either channel. An email open is recorded by a tracking pixel that mail privacy features block or fetch in advance, so an open count is not a count of people who read anything. A text has no open event at all.
Clicks are the signal both channels produce, which is the argument for sending a tracked link rather than a bare Google URL.
Email clicks need cleaning, and text clicks do not. Corporate mail security opens and follows the links in a message before the recipient ever sees it, to check where they go. That shows up as a click on your review request from someone who has not read it. Our own click counting filters the known preview and scanner agents for exactly this reason, and it is a lesson people generally learn the day an email campaign reports clicks that nobody made. Messages sent as texts are not scanned this way.
Neither channel tells you the request never arrived. A wrong address or a number that belongs to a landline fails somewhere you are not looking. Watch the clicks and treat a silent batch as a delivery question, not as customers who ignored you.
The honest recommendation
Use the channel you can actually send on today, to the contact detail you actually hold. For a new account that means email with a tracked link, and text once carrier registration is through.
Pick one per customer, not both. A request that arrives twice, in two places, for one job, reads as pressure rather than as a favour, and the second one does not add anything the first did not already ask for.
Whichever you choose, the wording matters less than the timing and the link. Templates for both channels are in the free review request templates tool, the wording is in how to ask customers for reviews, and when to press send is worked through in the best time to ask for a review.
One link, either channel. Build your free Google review link, then let ReviewKit send it and count the clicks that were real. No contract, cancel in one click.