What does it mean to be in trend? Understand youth slang, add pop-ups to the product catalog, or maybe run challenges? For businesses, being in trend means first and foremost using modern approaches in communicating with customers. One of them is personalization.
Hundreds of SMS messages are sent every minute. Short letters fly to different countries of the world, to mobile numbers of different operators, people of different ages and professions. In order for the client not to lose your message among a bunch of others, the SMS-mailing must be remembered. The best way to achieve this is to personalize your message.
Personalized messages allow you to not only contact customers by first name, but also to specify other information: the size of the personal discount, the time of personal training and classes, etc.
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How can you set up personalization for SMS mailings?
There are three main approaches:
- Behavioral – which is based on user actions that can be counted or measured: clicks, views, etc. With this approach, you can, for example, communicate with customers by email or SMS and offer products that are in the Customer’s Favorites or those that he or she recently opened.
- Demographic – which is based on physical or territorial characteristics. For example, you can immediately show your users the timing and delivery cost or offer the nearest store to their locality. Or conduct targeted SMS-mailings based on user geolocation data.
- In the first person – when the clients share information about themselves: birthday, marital status, location, and so on. You can use this information to optimize your sales funnel.
Here is the tip for you: one of the most famous methods of communication, described by psychologists a long time ago, is to call a person by name. According to the research, the human brain associates good pleasant memories and positive emotions with the name. If you want to set up customers in the right way and build a long-term dialogue with them, it is highly desirable to address the name.
Choosing a channel of communication with customers
The choice is all yours! This can be an e-mail with a selection of new books for the customer who buys them regularly. Or, for example, contextual advertising with categories of products that the user most often adds to Favorites, or marketing to key customers. Marketing specialists often choose SMS: 64% of users want to communicate with brands more often through this channel, and that is what we focus on.
Efficiency of SMS-mailings and text message marketing
The functionality of SMS messaging appeared in 1992, but it does not make it less effective or less popular in 2022. Here are some reasons.
- Give access to personal space
Are there many of your friends, colleagues, acquaintances who do not have a mobile phone? Meanwhile, people have become accustomed to sharing e-mails, not numbers, with brands. Why? Because the phone is a kind of pass to the space where everything favorite, interesting or important is concentrated, and to become a part of it for the brand is extremely important.
- Quick start of mass SMS-mailing
When you create a mass SMS to current customers, you do not need to enter a separate message for each. On modern platforms for text message marketing, like https://smartercontact.com/, you can configure the settings. All you need – a single text message and a table with personal offers (promo codes, promotions, products in Favorites, etc.)
- Mailing services are still relevant
SMS communication works with all generations of users. Compare: the frequency of opening messages is 98%, and, for example, emails – 15-25%. In addition, the efficiency of the SMS mailing is not inferior to online messengers and also has several advantages: it works on all mobile phones (even NOT smartphones), it does not depend on the Internet connection, and it does not require downloading any programs.
How to start?
Personalized SMS does not work for mass mailings, but works for large groups of customers, grouped by specific criteria (targets). Theoretically, your message sent to this group should be useful to each individual. In practice, this can only be done if you have certain user data.
The good news is that most people are willing to share some information about themselves for useful personal experiences. This is especially true of Generation Z, which grew up with technology and can’t imagine a world without gadgets.
But what data to collect? You can create a list of questions that would help segment the existing audience by specific factors. For example, age, gender, main settlement, what they are interested in, whether they have children or not, which holiday they prefer and so on. The list may vary depending on the needs of your brand, so feel fre to experiment!
When you analyze the answers, there will be people – the already mentioned customer groups, categorized by selected characteristics. Based on this information, you will be able to search for potential customers and expand your base. How to do it? For example, there are platforms which allow you to work with targeted SMS mailings. They can have audience filters that you can customize the recipients’ personalities.
Imagine that you are the owner of a small retail store. Very soon you will start an online sale, which you want to notify the existing and potential customer base about in a text message. You already have the information and understand which groups of people may be interested in the sale. The first group is women from 20 to 29 years old from Chicago who use smartphones on Android and mobile Internet. And, the second group is men aged 20 to 39 from Dallas, who use smartphones on Android or iOS and mobile internet as well. With this data, you select the desired audience filters on the mailing service and send messages to it.
When the campaign is over, analyze the actions of users with your messages. Based on this data, experiment with filters, the content of the message, the time of its sending. And remember: a brand that has information offers the best personal experience to its customers.
Any personalized messages attract the attention of the audience and form a loyal attitude to your brand. Due to such messages usually containing personal information, users open such SMS much more often than usual. That is why it is important to use proper services for text message marketing which you can trust.