Personalized SMS: How To Do It And What Variable To Use?

A few years back, Coca-Cola had this amazing campaign where they changed their famous logo on the bottle with some of the most popular names in different countries. Needless to say, the campaign was a success: people loved finding their names and the names of their loved ones on bottles, and sharing them with each other. Simple, yet genius.

When it comes to promotions and marketing, personalization is no longer an option but a must. As a brand, you need to start personalizing and customizing your messages as much as you can to ensure the effectiveness of your promotional efforts.

SMS is not an exception. Sending out the same message to all of your subscribers is, undoubtedly, easy, but it’s far from being the best strategy if you want to achieve results with your campaign. For your efforts to be effective, you want to add a personal touch.

But how to do it, and what variables to consider? To help you not get lost when trying to personalize your text messages, in this article, we take a look at why you should personalize your messages, as well as what variables you need to consider in the process.

Why Should You Personalize Your SMS?

Customizing your messages creates a personal experience for the recipient, helping you to improve the overall performance of your campaign and provide your subscribers with a better experience. You don’t want your message to come across as irrelevant or even worse, annoying. Rather, it should be seen as something that offers value to the recipients, as well as be well-planned and timely. Your subscribers should feel that you’ve put effort into crafting an SMS campaign that tries to address their needs instead of just selling a product.

Let’s take a look at some insightful statistics about communication personalization:

• 78% of consumers are more likely to engage with the offer if the experience is personalized;
• 83% of users are ready to exchange data for the improved personalized experience;
• 78% of marketers claim that personalization has a strong influence on campaign performance;
• 74% of consumers get irritated when receiving irrelevant promotional content.
  
  

If there is one thing we can glean from these numbers is that personalizing your text messages can help you improve the engagement rates, CTR, and overall performance of your campaigns, and ensure higher satisfaction rates.

SMS Personalization: Essential Variables to Consider

If you’ve never sent personalized messages or emails, the idea may seem a bit overwhelming at first. But it shouldn’t be! Personalization doesn’t mean that you need to manually craft individual SMS for each of your subscribers! In fact, you only need to customize several variables, and the tools you are using to send out your messages will do the rest. Below, we take a look at some of the more critical variables that you need to pay attention to.

Name Of The Recipients

Let’s start with the basics: addressing the recipient by their name is a must! While it’s true that SMS shouldn’t be too long, skipping an introduction is something you should avoid at all costs. A text starting with the name of your subscriber is more likely to catch their attention and be opened and read than a generic text that moves on straight to the offer, no matter how good that offer is.

Date of Birth

Another personalization variable that you shouldn’t miss is the date of birth. The very basic use of this personalization option is congratulating them on their birthdays. A small set up for you, but can be a pleasant message for your subscriber, improving their connection with your brand. You can even go as far as offering them a small discount, or free shipping for orders on that day. This will also help you target relevant products to your subscribers, ensuring they receive information on the products and services they will benefit from.

Segmentation Through Filters

Users are not just limited to their names and birthdays. It’s true that “Hi, Alex! “We have an offer for you” is better than “Hi! We have an offer for you!” there are still many variables that you can use to further personalize your text messages.

Gender - This type of personalization can come in handy, for example, when you are sending promotions about men's or women's clothing, or targeting men with gift ideas towards International Women’s Day.

Geographical Segmentation - Geographical filtering allows you to target people located in specific areas or different parts of the world. For example, if you have a brick-and-mortar location and there is a sale, you can use geographical segmentation to announce it to your subscribers living nearby. This feature comes in handy also in case of country-specific holidays.

Behavioral Segmentation - Personalize your texts based on the behavior of your subscribers, e.g. if they’ve made a purchase recently, they haven’t purchased anything in a long time. You can also use this type of segmentation to offer discounts and promotions to loyal customers.

Wrapping Up

When creating your next SMS campaign, make sure to keep these variables in mind. Small tweaks here and changes there will result in a much better experience for your subscribers, who’ll feel appreciated and cared about, ultimately improving the campaign outcomes. And if you are looking for easy and quick ways to personalize different variables of your SMS campaigns, and make them more personal, YooTelco offers powerful tools just for that. Learn more about them on our website and drop us a message if you have any questions!