It goes without saying that the recipe for an engaging SMS campaign starts with ensuring the message itself is relevant to your customers. Personalisation can help you with this but it’ll only take you half the way. The other half will be down to how well you collect and use your customer data.
But personalisation isn’t just handy for improving your SMS open rates, it’s also been proven to impact conversion rate. A recent study found that 77% of buyers won’t purchase without personalised content and 83% say it enhances the buying experience.
Our last blog talks more about why personalisation is key, but now let’s get into how you can actually make your SMS campaigns more personal.
So let’s get into it.
Nail down consent
First things first. To send any marketing SMS message you must have your customer’s permission to be contacted via this channel. They must have opted-in to receive SMS messages and shared their number with you for that purpose.
Customers want personalisation, but only if they’ve signed up for it.
Once you have your segmented contact lists, it’s all about using the data that you have to connect your customers on a new level.
There are two ways that you can do this:
1. Sharing information that’s specific to the individual
2. Tailoring messaging and offers based on each segmented group
With a bulk SMS platform (the software you use to run your text marketing campaigns) you can achieve both.
First, you can upload groups from a spreadsheet to your platform. This will automatically pull data you’ve collected into the platform as personalisation tokens to help you craft ultra-targeted copy.
You can also connect your bulk SMS platform to your CRM or sales software via an SMS API. We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of what an API (Application Programming Interface) is here, but in basic terms, it links data in your CRM or sales software to your bulk SMS platform so you can seamlessly send personalised messages whenever a customer completes an action.
With access to the data, SMS software lets you personalise texts at scale using dynamic fields.
For example, something as simple as addressing customers by their first name can go a long way toward boosting your open rates. With dynamic fields, you can scale this up to cover thousands of subscribers at once without the hassle of manually inserting first names for them all. All you have to do is write your message in the platform, select “First Name” from a drop-down menu and place it in your text.
The message might look like something like this:
“I think you might have forgotten something, [FIRST NAME]? It’s safe for now, but head to checkout ASAP before it’s gone! 🏃”
When you launch your SMS campaign, the software pulls in the first name linked to the recipient’s number from your group, so they see their name:
“I think you might have forgotten something, Emma? It’s safe for now, but head to checkout ASAP before it’s gone! 🏃”
This is just a basic example, you can use dynamic fields to input more personal data such as their company name, job title, location, order history, and more.
Get timing on your side
Using personalisation well to send ultra-targeted and relevant SMS marketing campaigns is one way to grab your customers’ attention, but we also know that timing can be a big factor in pushing a sale over the line. And getting that ‘perfect timing’ on your side could be a surefire way to boost your conversion rate.
Here’s some ideas of how you could create that moment of ‘perfect timing’:
Celebrate personal milestones
Catch your customers when they’re celebrating – use seasons, holidays, and occasions as a way to inject some more personalisation into your text campaigns. To help your campaign stand out even more, think beyond common milestones and look at information like their anniversary as a customer with you, or any specific information that’s relevant to your business that only you can celebrate with your customer.
This could be things like:
- Purchase congratulations
- Course completions
- Successful referrals
- Loyalty points
When you launch an SMS campaign has a big impact on how well your customers respond. For instance, if you run a restaurant sending an offer on a Monday morning before you open is less likely to be as effective as sending one on a Friday afternoon as people start to plan for the weekend ahead.
We can also apply this to eCommerce, you’re more likely to get more take up for a discount SMS campaign that launches during commute hours when people will be checking their phones.
Make sure you track your campaign’s performance, the more you can learn from your data the easier finding that timing sweet spot will be.
Use SMS automation for frequent tasks
A large part of effective personalisation is a high level of responsiveness. When a customer completes an action like signing up for a newsletter, buying a product or asking a question, they expect a fast response.
Hubspot research shows 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as essential or very important when they have a customer service question. 60% of customers define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less.
SMS automation lets you send messages based on triggers without having to manually deploy them. So you can respond to customers instantly, even if you’re not physically there to do it, all thanks to an SMS API.
What if you wanted to send an automated text message to confirm when customers make an order on your website?
You could draft something like this:
Thanks for your order, [NAME]! Your confirmation number is #1078915. We’ll text you when your product is shipped.
When a customer enters their details and completes a purchase, your sales platform detects the sale and sends a request to the SMS API to send the text message. This all happens in seconds.
You can then schedule automated follow-up messages to keep your customers informed of the whole order fulfilment process and then to collect feedback.
Use automation to personalise the customer experience for common actions or events:
- Order confirmations
- Welcome messages
- Birthday celebrations
- Special offers or promotions
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Appointment or payment reminders
Automation isn’t a replacement for agents, it’s an extra resource to help you improve your customer service journey. While 8 out of 10 people say the most important elements of positive customer experience are speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service, most prefer human interaction.
Make sure you’re monitoring interactions and delivering a human response where relevant.
Improving personalisation with A/B testing
Personalisation is a proven way to boost marketing effectiveness and strengthen customer relationships, there’s no telling how much of a difference it will make until you start sending messages and measuring the results.
And there’s no telling if a message is performing as well as it could be until you test a second version alongside it. This is what A/B testing is: comparing two (or more) versions of a message to see which brings in better results.
Say, you’re setting up a campaign for a sales alert. You create two messages, with different CTAs and links.
Version A: Hey [NAME], it’s your last chance to take advantage of our secret sale. 🙏 Browse your wishlist and bag a bargain now: [LINK]
Version B: Hey [NAME], it’s your last chance to take advantage of our secret sale. 🙏 Shop now and save up to 50% [LINK]
From your segment, you can make a sample audience of 500 people. You send version A to 250 people and version B to the other 250 contacts.The test results will show which version is engaging your customer base more.
If 200 people respond to version A and only 50 respond to version B, you know which version best achieves your campaign goals. That’s a successful A/B test.
You can run a different test for almost every element of your message, it’s an ongoing process with endless options. But to get the most accurate results, here are a few best practices to keep in mind:
- Test one variable at a time: If you want to see how adding emojis compares to plain text, use the same copy in both versions. But if you also want to see how a casual tone performs against a formal tone, run two separate tests, rather than testing different variables (i.e. emojis and tone) at the same time.
- Use large sample sizes: The larger the segment, the more accurate the results. We recommend testing with a group of at least 300 subscribers.
- Run multiple tests: Gather as much data as possible. If you find your audience prefers texts that include their name, run the test again in a few different campaigns to verify results are consistent.
The bottom line
There are many ways you can use personalisation to enhance your SMS campaigns, and we’ve looked at the supporting elements that will boost your results: personalised offers, dynamic fields for personalisation at scale, timing, and effective SMS copy backed by A/B testing.
Are you ready to take your customer relationships to the next level?