Artificial Intelligence (AI) has forever altered how businesses market their products and services. In the case of Short Message Service (SMS) marketing—commonly known as texting—AI is making it possible to target consumers more accurately via a higher level of personalization, leading to more effective campaigns and increased ROI overall.
AI SMS Marketing in a Nutshell
Did you know that 95% of text messages are read within the first 3 minutes of delivery? That’s why SMS is arguably the most effective way to ensure a large number of people see your message in a short amount of time. Traditional SMS marketing also has above-average conversion and click-through rates. However, AI SMS marketing gives businesses tools to take those already above-average rates to extraordinary levels.
What You Do With SMS Automation
There is a wide range of applications for AI in marketing, particularly when it comes to automating tasks throughout the customer journey. When it comes to AI SMS marketing, AI is most commonly used in one of three ways:
- Generating content for SMS marketing campaigns, including copy and images.
- Analyzing data from past campaigns and current market trends to deliver key insights and predictions about campaign performance.
- Personalizing SMS messages to be more aligned with the individual interests of each customer so they’re more likely to respond and take action.
Benefits of AI SMS Marketing
The biggest overarching benefit of AI in SMS marketing is the improved ROI. This improvement is made possible because of all the different ways AI helps streamline SMS marketing processes.
For starters, AI is capable of automatically completing repetitive, daily tasks such as data entry. An SMS AI will log data quickly and accurately to your CRM, reducing the risk of human error and freeing up time and resources that can then be applied to other high-priority areas.
Additionally, SMS AI improves the customer experience by delivering personalized recommendations and tailored AI text messages based on key insights its algorithms pull from analyzing customer data. Customer engagement will rise as you provide more relevant SMS messaging more often and keep your business top of mind for consumers. Personalization improves brand loyalty and ultimately increases sales as customers are recommended products and services that align with their interests.
How to Launch an SMS Marketing Campaign
There are three major phases or steps to launch an SMS marketing campaign. Phase one is research. During this phase, you’ll seek to understand the audience and target market. AI can help you quickly analyze and understand who they are and what motivates them. The more you know, the more you can tailor your messaging to appeal to each audience segment.
Once you know who you’re sending messages to, you can move to phase two: planning and ideation. This phase entails making a timeline and planning workflows for the campaign, including when each message blast will go out, what follow-up messages will be sent after specific actions, and when the campaign will end. You’ll also start writing your messages during this phase, and fine-tune the more specific details of your campaign. Remember, texting is effective because it’s short and to the point, so keep your messages brief but impactful. Once you have a general idea of what you’d like to include in the message, you can use AI SMS to help you draft variations of the original text that appeal to each audience segment.
Finally, phase three: launch and monitor. An SMS marketing campaign isn’t over when you click send; in fact, far from it. Once the first message has been sent, you’ll want to watch and monitor how your campaign is performing. Depending on engagement levels and how well customers respond to the messaging, you may want to make adjustments to message copy or frequency to increase your success rates. Companies will often do some A/B testing during this phase to see which messages perform better. AI can help you quickly analyze and summarize this data, as well as predict campaign outcomes based on prior performance. All of this will help you optimize your marketing efforts and maximize your ROI.
AI-Powered Targeting
Leveraging Data for Precise Audience Segmentation
AI SMS marketing allows for extremely precise audience segmentation due to AI’s advanced capacity for gathering and comparing large sets of data from multiple sources. Using algorithms and pattern-recognition software, AI can quickly spot patterns, commonalities, and trends in your data, and then categorize audiences accordingly. Audience segmentation facilitates more precise targeting so businesses can break down their audiences into smaller subsets that respond and react similarly.
Dynamic Content Creation Based on Customer Behavior
With machine learning technology, AI can continually intake data throughout your AI SMS marketing campaign, then learn and adapt based on how customers are responding to the messages. The SMS AI will note which messages resulted in the desired response from each segment and use that information to generate more content that’s along the lines of the successful messages.
Over time, it will become more accurate at targeting the right people with the right message, increasing the likelihood of conversion among each customer base. In this way, AI enables businesses to produce dynamic content that can be quickly adapted to changing market trends and consumer behavior so it remains as effective as possible.
Personalization at Scale For AI SMS Marketing
One of the main reasons AI is taking off in the marketing world is because of its scalability. Unlike humans who are limited in the number of tasks they can work on at a time, AI SMS marketing can deliver the same level of research, message preparation, customization, and behavior tracking to multiple customers simultaneously.
As a machine, there’s no limit to how many messages or customers AI can manage at a time. The larger the group, the more data it will have to analyze and the more accurate it will become. This means AI SMS marketing can easily offer deep personalization for many customers at a time, scaling up or down with your business as needed.
Customized Messages for Individual Customers
AI SMS marketing enables companies to offer highly relevant content to their customers. Using past purchase history, online behavior, and other data like demographics, AI can tailor every SMS message it sends to each customer.
Adaptive Messaging Based on Customer Preferences
AI SMS marketing is an ongoing process. AI is smart enough to monitor responses to messages and learn from them. With every message sent, the AI will adapt its messaging to be more on target with what that customer responds to and appreciates, ultimately increasing brand loyalty and retention over time.
Improving Campaign Effectiveness
There’s no doubt you can see significant improvements to your AI SMS marketing campaign through the time-saving benefits of having an AI assistant automate simple tasks for you. However, there are a few specific ways you can apply AI to your SMS marketing that will significantly improve the effectiveness of your campaign.
Automated A/B Testing for Optimal Message Performance
When planning your campaign in phase two, you can incorporate clear splits in the automation workflow to incorporate some A/B testing. For example, if a customer abandons their cart, send one group Follow-up Text #1 and another Follow-up Text #2. The AI can automatically assign customers evenly to path one or path two, then help you measure the results to see which message is more successful at persuading customers to come back and complete their purchase.
Real-time Analytics and Insights for Data-driven Decisions
Data analytics is where an AI SMS really shines. The processing power of AI and machine learning is unmatched by human analysis. It can assess all gathered data in seconds and continually compile insights for managers to review in real time. This step facilitates more data-driven decisions during the AI SMS marketing campaign.
Managing an AI SMS marketing campaign isn’t hard if you have the right tools available. With Podium, you can easily manage every aspect of your campaign in one central location. And, with the help of our AI Employee, you can bring the power of AI to your marketing plans. From generating copy and communicating with customers, to scheduling help and automation capabilities, Podium’s AI Employee can do it all. It can even scan and recognize imagery, taking SMS conversations with your customers to the next level with deeper, more meaningful interactions.
Request a demo of Podium’s AI Employee today and see firsthand how the many time-saving benefits of AI can help improve your business’s SMS marketing.
