3 Ways to Make Your SMS Marketing More Personable

Our amazing Chief Product Officer, Zach Holmquist, wrote in a recent article, “Show your customers you give a sh*t about them. The eCommerce marketplace looks different than it did two years ago, and there’s new profiles for both buyers and sellers. There’s always going to be a place for automation and bots, but your brand can’t prioritize those things over a human-led customer experience.” 

A personalized, human-led experience is not only preferred, but it is also now expected from customers. Especially from channels such as SMS, which are amongst the most intimate and effective communication channels today. 

So here are three ways to make your SMS more personable and, in turn, a better experience for your customers. 

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SMS Contact Cards 

A Contact Card contains your company's contact information and allows subscribers to save your number as a contact on their phone with a dedicated image and other essential information. It takes your text from popping up on your customer's home screens from a random slue of numbers to a contact, just like texts from their friends and family. 

SMS marketing is one of the more personal and effective communication channels today. This marketing channel has a 98% open rate and your messages end up alongside messages from family and friends. Contact Cards takes your SMS marketing one step further into personalization and familiarity. 

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Best Practices for Sending Contact Cards 

• Remember to upload a contact picture with your logo. It will make your brand easily recognizable when your messages pop up or if a customer is looking for your text thread. 
• Fill out all the fields of your Contact Card so that customers get the most value out of adding you to their contact list.  
• Add your Contact Card to your welcome series so that new subscribers can add your Contact Card as soon as they opt into your SMS program. 
• Showcase your brand personality from the get-go and use the opportunity to deploy Keywords to gather more information about your subscribers.

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Personalization (But It Doesn’t Have to be Complicated)

While the sky's the limit when it comes to SMS personalization, you can start small, and even better brand specific, and see incredible results. 

For example, a very simple way to personalize is by sending messages based on time zones. Time zone sending enables you to send a campaign to all your subscribers at a scheduled time in each subscriber's local time zone. Timing matters which is why brands should be strategic when using customer time zones to get the most click-throughs and conversions. The McDonald's welcome series in the previous section asks for time zones because they don’t want to text you about lunch when you're on the west coast, so you are actually in breakfast mode. 

A brand-specific example of personalization is from Birthdate Co., a company that crafts one-of-a-kind astrology candles and books. Ajay Mehta, the CEO and co-founder of Birthdate Co. described their customers on a recent podcast as “a really excited and vibrant community of people that loved astrology and sharing astrology content”. With this in mind, Birthdate Co. started sending weekly horoscope SMS campaigns that saw CTRs of over 20%. These campaigns focused on what draws customers to their brand and capitalizes on that. 

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👀 Watch Ajay Mehta and Voyage CEO Rev Reddy discuss why Birthdate Co.’s products have been such a success, Ajay’s journey as an entrepreneur, and much more here. 

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1:1 Conversations 

In a world of chatbots, the most personalized way to interact with customers over SMS is with real people. Human connection is a powerful tool that will not only help companies gain revenue in the short term, but drive connections and loyalty in the long run. By looping a human into the conversation at strategic points in the customer journey, brands have seen incredible results. 

Brands that have implemented cart abandonment live agent recovery have seen: 

• 6.4x more abandoned checkouts recovered — representing over $289,000 in revenue.
• $30k of lost revenue was recouped in a matter of months.
• 117% increase in revenue from recovered checkouts. 

First Mate by Voyage allows you to loop in live agents to act as your Brand Ambassadors via SMS. With data from your integrations and your brand standards as a guide, Brand Ambassadors have the full context of the customer journey and engage your customers with delightful, human conversations. AKA real conversations powered by real people. 

You can experience First Mate first-hand now! Get to know our live agents with an SMS demo of First Mate. Text “FIRSTMATE” to +1 (323) 606-6031 or scan the QR code to get started!

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SMS Needs to Be Personal

Your SMS marketing messages end up in the literal hands of your customers alongside conversations with loved ones. That intimate of a channel needs to be used correctly and personalized. The Voyage SMS platform integrates deeply into your existing tech stack, giving you powerful Segmentation capabilities that allow you to micro-market at scale based on customer attributes and event history. Your Voyage data, integrations, and custom events provide you with a multitude of ways to segment your SMS subscriber list. Add that with human-to-human communication, and you have all the tools you need to create a human-led SMS strategy. 

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Engage your subscribers with care — at scale. Start driving revenue and building meaningful relationships with your customers today. Get a demo and start your Voyage.

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