Personalization is essential to all 1-1 communication with your customers. Customers want to avoid talking to someone who communicates impersonally; they want to speak to a natural person. Therefore, personalization is essential to achieve good SMS marketing results. Not only because it puts a face on your brand but also because your customers will feel appreciated when you adapt your message to them. So what is personalization in SMS marketing, and why is it important? Keep reading, and we’ll go through it.
What is personalization?
Personalization has become synonymous with all forms of marketing as data has become more readily available and easier to track. Personalization concerns tonality, data, and the opportunity to improve the customer experience. If you imagine how you talk and behave with your best friends – that’s precisely what you want to emulate in your SMS marketing. To create personalized SMS, you first need to collect the correct data. This data can be anything you want, but here are some examples of commonly used data:
Name
Birthday
Gender
City
Country
Many people make the mistake of sounding as formal and polite as possible in SMS and email, but this has been proven to affect B2B and B2C negatively.
Why is personalization good for SMS marketing?
Personalization gives the customer exactly what they want – a personal experience and connection with your brand. In email marketing, it has been seen that personalized subject lines and content generate 5.7 times more profit than identical mailings that are not personalized. Similar figures also apply to SMS. After all, many forms of marketing have become very oversaturated. So much so that a new term has been coined called “banner blindness.”
This phenomenon means that a large percentage of people who surf the Internet unconsciously ignore all forms of marketing in the form of banners and advertisements that appear, even if they would be directly relevant to them. The same applies to the dry “corporate” talk that often characterizes promotions and mailings. We are people, and we buy from people. So the bot talk doesn’t work.
How to collect the correct data for personalization
When your customers approve that, you collect data, or “opt-in,” as it is called. So you have the opportunity to collect essential data, albeit quite limited. To get better and more detailed information about your customers, you can offer a reward in exchange for, for example, a quiz or a survey to personalize the customer’s experience. In the form, you can collect all relevant data such as birthday, work, and interests to use in your SMS.
Tips for personalization in SMS marketing
Personalizing SMS, which is usually shorter in text length, can be challenging. To get over that threshold, you can instead send longer SMS in chains to have a better opportunity to personalize your messages. But personalization is not just about the message itself. Relevant information is also what times the customer shops, what product the customer buys, or how often the customer shops with you. All of this can be used to personalize the customer’s experience.
Please build your customer profiles with your data, review where it can be improved, and develop strategies to gather the needed information. Personalization is here to stay and to avoid falling behind, it’s a good idea to start now.
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