Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undergone an immense rise in popularity with digital marketers over the last year. In 2023 alone, AI will generate over $27 billion in marketing revenue for businesses—a total that’s set to quadruple over the next half-decade.
With the widespread adoption of increasingly sophisticated tools like ChatGPT, new marketing strategies are popping up to take advantage of AI’s expanding capabilities. AI can sift through customer data, segment users into like-minded groups and generate content that appeals to them, amongst other complex and time-consuming marketing tasks.
One particularly powerful use of AI is optimizing your SMS marketing plan. If you’re wondering how to use AI for marketing success on your SMS campaigns, we’re outlining some key use cases and best practices for this cutting-edge technology.
4 Ways AI Can Serve Your SMS Strategy
From providing valuable insight into your customer base to helping generate more memorable messages, AI can serve a variety of functions for your business. Here, we’ll discuss four primary ways to put AI to work optimizing your SMS strategy.
Understanding Your Audience
AI has significantly simplified the data collection and analysis process for businesses. In the past, marketers had to sort through, analyze and draw conclusions about their customer data.
Modern AI tools, however, have automated many of these processes and freed marketers up to focus on other tasks. Contemporary AI tools can now:
- Collect a wider range of information than ever before
- Organize data based on your specific goals and industry requirements
- Analyze information and provide key insight into the habits and preferences of your target audience
This kind of robust, useful data is critical to inform your business’s segmentation and messaging tactics. With relevant information about your audience, you can more easily separate them into groups with similar interests and sensibilities.
This allows you to tailor messages and offers that are more likely to resonate with your different segments. And, when customers are sent texts with products or services they desire, they’re more likely to click through and you’re more likely to make a conversion. Which brings us to the next use of AI for SMS: Personalization.
Personalizing Text Messages
AI presents the opportunity to deliver a personal touch with each and every text you send. When composing messages, AI for SMS can customize them with pertinent customer particulars, such as names, locations, ages or other relevant information.
SMS personalization goes even further than these essential details, however. By tracking individual customer behavior, you can cater text messages to:
- Remind them of products they’ve recently viewed on your site or put in their cart and encourage them to complete their purchase
- Offer discount codes or special offers to loyal customers who’ve repeatedly patronized your business
- Extend apologies or compensation to customers who’ve had a frustrating experience
Essentially, modern AI tools allow businesses to cater text messages to specific individuals and situations without a human having to write them all individually. This kind of customization makes individual subscribers feel appreciated, which is critical in efforts such as a bulk SMS blast.
For businesses with hundreds or thousands of customers, AI allows for a level of SMS personalization that likely would’ve been impossible just a few years ago.
Drafting Quick Text Message Templates
Perhaps the most famous AI tool currently in use is OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This impressive language model is widely known for scouring its massive database for information and generating text based on user inputs.
In the world of SMS marketing, this has the potential to revolutionize how marketers write texts. With AI programs like ChatGPT, you have the ability to access a wide variety of message drafts at the click of a button.
By typing up a quick prompt, businesses can instantly generate a plethora of relatively customized messages to suit their marketing goals. Then, it’s just a matter of sorting through the list to find your favorite, proofreading and tweaking it to more closely fit the situation and sending it off to your subscribers.
Building SMS Campaigns
Creative work such as campaign ideation and development used to be the sole domain of human marketers, but now AI is getting in on the ground floor.
With analytical tools that tell you what parts of your business are underperforming and which are delivering, AI can help you find a focus to direct your next SMS campaign. Furthermore, by highlighting what demographics you’ve been resonating with and which are faltering, it can likewise help you decide what consumer segments to target.
From choosing which products to pitch to forecasting a campaign’s potential profit, AI offers modern marketers a variety of key information and assistance to build SMS campaigns.
Best Practices When Using AI for SMS
While AI tools are useful for gathering data and expediting creative tasks, they’re no one-to-one replacement for digital marketers. There’s a certain intangible quality that the human touch gives to messages and campaigns. Thus, businesses should be sure to:
- Fact-check ChatGPT and other generative AI’s creations—especially with recent studies revealing OpenAI’s technological marvel may be getting less accurate with each new edition
- Tweak textual outputs to remove the notoriously rigid and robotic writing aesthetic associated with AI and give them a warmer, more human feel
- Use AI for more general tasks, such as data collection, but leave more intricate work, such as writing heartfelt, on-brand press releases, up to creative staff
As AI advances and becomes even more complex than it is now, accuracy and imagination may be less of an issue. However, as it stands in 2023, it’s best used in tandem with digital marketers to develop more informed, diverse SMS strategies than as a stand-in for human creatives.
Use AI and Texting Base to Optimize Your SMS Marketing Approach
AI platforms like ChatGPT are one of many tools digital marketers should use to optimize their SMS marketing strategies and deliver more successful campaigns. Other mediums, such as Facebook ads and Shopify, are also fruitful spaces to collect user data and manage contact information to inform your texting tactics.
Perhaps the most important texting tool of them all, however, is Texting Base. Texting Base is a robust SMS marketing aid that can help you intricately personalize your messages and generate more engaging SMS blasts. Plus, it’s a breeze to integrate and utilize alongside other effective tools such as social media, messaging platforms and, of course, AI assistants.
AI for SMS is all about making digital marketers’ jobs easier while simultaneously improving the quality of their campaigns. But, generative language models like ChatGPT aren’t the only—or even necessarily the most effective—tools for the job.
Take Texting Base for a spin on your next campaign to see what the leading SMS marketing platform can do for you.
