What is a personalized SMS?

SMS marketing is a powerful way to reach customers and drive revenue. However, just as with email, not all SMS messages are created equal. 

To truly stand out in a crowded marketplace, it’s all about delivering messages that resonate with your audience. 

How to do it? Personalization. 

Personalized SMS can help your brand stand out and build a stronger connection with customers and subscribers. 

Here’s what you need to know.

The basics of personalized SMS

By now, personalizing email is a best practice for most brands. Data shows customers respond to it, and personalization helps boost engagement, conversions, and revenue. 

So, why not use the same approach with your text message campaigns?

Using personalization in your SMS means creating customized messages tailored to each reader. Personalization can be as simple as using their name or pulling in preferential, behavioral, or loyalty data. 

Having data allows you to create more relevant and engaging messages, which helps increase clicks and conversions.

The Benefits of SMS personalization

You know the benefits of email personalization. Well, they all carry over to text message campaigns too. 

Some of the biggest benefits?

• Improved customer experience: Everything is about customer experience today. Personalized SMS can make it easy to shop, streamline checkouts, and keep messages the same across platforms. 
• Build better connections: Personalized messaging makes customers feel connected with your company, which helps build long-term customer loyalty.
• Increased engagement: Personalization is the way to go if you want to capture your customer’s attention. And to raise the bar even higher, add animated messaging.
• Higher conversion rates: Relevant and timely messages are more likely to be clicked. That’s just a fact. So delivering custom content to each subscriber helps increase action.

Combining SMS and email can make your overall personalization strategy stand out even more. 

It helps meet customers where they are and gives them multiple points of contact to engage with you. And you’re giving your readers a unified cross-channel experience, which helps spread the message. 

How to use personalized SMS

Ok, ready to see some examples of personalization in action? We thought you’d never ask. 

Here are a few of our favorite ways to get into SMS personalization. 

Location data is such a great way to start approaching personalization. Use it to get hyper-personalized on everything from their nearest store to weather-related product recommendations.

Another approach is to look at loyalty. Loyal customers are the best; you don’t want to ignore them in SMS. So show them how they can use their loyalty points toward saving money or special offers.

SMS doesn’t have to stop after the transaction. Continue to use it to build communication with your customers. Share informative and educational content based on their purchases.

You can also approach SMS in the same way as triggered behavioral emails. Send a text to remind people of products left behind, let them know when there’s a big sale coming up, or when a flash promo is on.

Lastly, don’t forget about surprise and delight. Consumers still love getting something special from their favorite brands. So use SMS to wish them a happy birthday or anniversary or thank them for being a loyal customer.

Create personalized messages with Zembula 

Do you want an easy solution for maximizing your personalization? Then, we’ve got you covered. 

Using the Zembula platform, you can add personalization to every email and SMS you send. All you need to do is hook up your customer data, add a snippet of code, and we take care of the rest. 

The heavy lifting is done for you — no need to change your workflows or add extra time to your processes. All of it is done for you automatically. And it works for both email and SMS. 

Interested? We’d love to show you how Zembula works. Click here to request a demo.