SMS marketing - Best practice for personalization

Personalization is an essential part of all 1-1 communication with your customers. Your prospects don't want to talk to a faceless entity. They want to communicate with an actual person.

Therefore, personalization is super important to get good results with your SMS marketing. Not only because it puts a face on your brand, but also because your customers feel more appreciated when you tailor your messages to them.

So what is personalization in SMS marketing, and why is it important? Keep reading, and we'll explain.

What is personalization?

Personalization has become synonymous with all forms of marketing, with data becoming more accessible and easier to track.

Personalization is about tonality, data and opportunity to improve the customer experience. If you imagine for a second how you talk and behave with your very best friend - that's precisely what you want to emulate in your SMS marketing.

To be able to create personalized SMS, you first need to collect the correct data. This data may be anything you want, but here are some examples of the most commonly used data:

• Name
• Birthday
• Gender
• City
• Country

On a side note, many people make the mistake of sounding as formal and polite as they can in SMS and email, but this has been shown 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 contact with your brand.

In email marketing, personalized subject lines and content provide 5.7 times more conversions than the same emails 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 nowadays unknowingly ignore all forms of marketing in the form of banners and advertisements that appear, even if it would be directly relevant to them.
The same applies to the dry "corporate" talk that often characterizes advertisements, emails and text messages. We are people, and we buy from people. So the robot talk won't cut it.

How to collect the correct data for personalization

When your customers opt-in to receive SMS marketing from you, you've got the opportunity to collect the most essential data.

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 then collect all relevant data such as birthday, work, interests and then later use it in your marketing texts.

Tips for personalization in SMS marketing

It can be difficult to personalize SMS, which is usually shorter in text length. To bypass this threshold, you can instead send longer text messages in chains so that you have more space to personalize your messages.

But personalization is not just about the message itself. Relevant information is also what times the customer buys, what type of product the customer buys or how often the customer buys from you. All this can be used to personalize the customer experience.

Spend some time building your customer profiles with the data you have, then review where it can be improved and develop strategies to gather the information you need.
Personalization is here to stay, and in order not to fall behind, it's a good idea to get started right now.