Personalization: it’s the be-all and end-all of an optimized SMS marketing campaign. But why, actually? And what exactly does it mean to personalize a campaign? And anyway, what data do you use to personalize your campaign? How personal is too personal? We would like to answer these and other questions in this blog post, so that you too can benefit from the positive effects of personalization.
So let’s take a closer look together.
Especially in marketing, personalized experiences are essential for pleasing your customers today. Successful personalization creates closeness and trust, and ideally ensures that your customers have the best possible experience with your brand that you can offer them.
The numbers clearly speak for themselves here.
As you can see: A personalized message is part of a good overall experience for your customers. So it’s more than just using a customer’s name – everything about your SMS should feel personal to recipients and fit into a cohesive experience. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you send personalized bulk SMS and not just the same message to every customer – an impersonal bulk message can hardly be part of a personalized experience.
Personalization can only be as good as the data it is based on. This is also true for sending personalized bulk SMS. In the post-cookie era, using zero party data can be a best practice. This is where you get the data you need directly from your customers – voluntarily and deliberately.
The good news is that the results of a large-scale survey conducted by the management consulting service provider Accenture show that 83% of all consumers are willing to share their data with a company if they receive personalized experiences in return (source: Accenture).
Every beginning is hard – where do you start when personalizing and what do you need to pay special attention to? First, you should decide on a strategy, i.e. determine how, what and when you want to personalize. After that, there are two elementary points that you should consider in any personalization. Firstly, it is imperative that you segment your target groups, and secondly, you should definitely be as transparent as possible about the fact that you are using customer data for personalization.
Placeholders are important for sending personalized bulk SMS. Learn how to create and use them here:
First, be clear about what you want from personalization and what type of personalization is realistic for you.
Do you want to personalize all aspects of the customer experience? Which channels are involved? Are personalized offers or personalized follow-ups perhaps enough for you as a starting point? When and how will you test whether personalization has achieved the desired goals? Choose your strategy, set a goal, and continue….
By the way: If you want to send personalized bulk SMS, a flexible SMS gateway will help you to put this into practice. Always keep in mind: Personalization only succeeds if the data behind it is not only coherent, but also well maintained.
We never tire of emphasizing how important it is to segment your target groups. And not “because that’s how it’s done”, but because it’s elementary to successfully implementing your personalized bulk SMS campaigns.
Always keep in mind what personalization is all about: you want to build a real personal relationship with your customers. The more detailed you can respond to the different needs of your customers, the more successful you will be.
You want to create a recipient group in our webapp? Learn how to do it in our helpdesk.
You’ve already read that most customers explicitly want personalized experiences, and they’re willing to share information with you in order to receive those experiences. Your customers generally don’t mind you asking for and using data from them. But they want to be involved in this exchange actively and explicitly.
Not least for this reason, you should always communicate clearly when you collect data and for what purpose. After all, if you use data that your customer doesn’t know how you obtained, personalization may be perceived as negative:
Of the 27 percent of consumers who reported a brand experience that was too personal or invasive, almost two-thirds (64 percent) say it was because the brand had information about the consumer that they didn’t share knowingly or directly (…)
Admittedly, the wording here is a bit misleading, because good personalization is never finished, but changes throughout the life cycles of a customer and in many cases even beyond. Of course, this is also important to keep in mind when you send personalized bulk SMS, for example for exclusive offers or reactivation campaigns.
In a broader sense, however, the question still arises: What happens when you launch personalized campaigns? Ideally, through successful personalization, you build a close and personal customer relationship that you nurture and develop. Use conversational marketing to stay in an active dialog with your customers. This way, you not only build a relationship with your customers, but also get to know much faster if customers are dissatisfied with their experience.
The personal relationship with your customers will pay off in any case, not only because of the higher willingness to buy and the increased loyalty, but also because of the additional information you can get in a conversation with customers. Just give it a try – personalized bulk SMS are a great start.
