AI's Role in Tailoring Personalized Text Marketing Campaigns

AI is a crucial tool in many industries, including marketing. But it’s not just businesses that want it — customers already require the use of AI. In fact, 41% of consumers prefer brands using AI in their customer experience journeys. And that number is bound to increase as AI solutions continue to evolve. AI-automated text message marketing is one of the best and easiest ways to keep customers happy.

Here, we’ll tell you how AI enhances the customer experience and why it’s essential for businesses and organizations to buy into this technology.

The Benefits of Using AI in Text Marketing

What’s in it for businesses? Here are some of the benefits of using AI in text marketing.

AI Streamlines Workflows

Can AI automation save time and resources in text message marketing? Yes! AI automation can save time and resources in text message marketing. Your teams can manage SMS marketing workflows, but AI can help streamline them. AI solutions ease the load on marketing teams, automating specific tasks and improving the efficiency of your campaigns.

Plus, employees can focus on more creative opportunities rather than repetitive tasks. By allowing your teams to do work that sparks innovation and professional growth, AI is helping to improve the employee experience. Happier, more engaged employees translate to a better customer experience.

AI Generates Better Leads

Lead generation is easier with AI, which can identify the most promising leads based on your customer persona, demographics, motivations, online behavior, and more.

Check out these customer list growth tools to get started.

AI Helps You Understand Your Customers Better

With data analytics, machine and deep learning, and predictive analytics, AI can give you better insights into who your customers are, what drives them, and how they might interact with your brand.

AI Personalizes the Customer Experience at Scale

With AI automation, your team doesn’t need to work as hard to get personalized content to wider audiences; they can rely on AI to do it for them. AI takes all of its learnings and applies them to your message creation, triggered reminders, drip campaigns, product recommendations, and more — all at scale.

How Can AI Help Personalize Text Message Marketing Campaigns?

AI can help personalize text message marketing campaigns by segmenting customers into contact groups, analyzing past data to predict future behaviors and preferences, creating personalized SMS messages, and automating text blasts and replies to tailor each customer’s experience with your brand to their needs.

Here are some tangible examples of AI personalization at work.

Customer Segmentation

Gone are the days of manually segmenting contacts. This method is time-consuming and prone to human error. With generative AI, your customer segmentation tactics will be transformed.

AI technology can take all your customer data, analyze it at lightning speed, and segment groups according to your brand’s target market and customer profile. For example, it can create groups based on individuals who are high value (likely to engage and make a purchase) and lower value (those who don’t quite fit the target persona and might need more nurturing). Additionally, this automated text message marketing feature means that your contact groups aren’t stagnant — AI continually scans incoming data, meaning that your customer segmentation tactics can be updated in real-time.

But how does AI-powered customer segmentation lead to more effective text messages? AI-powered customer segmentation leads to more effective text messages because it produces more personalized SMS campaigns. Each contact group can receive targeted messages that directly pertain to their values, lifestyle, and where they are in their journey with your brand.

Predictive Analytics

AI isn’t just used to analyze past or current data and predict future customer behaviors. How? Analyzing historical data, uncovering patterns, and using algorithms to determine future trends.

This process is beneficial for text marketing because it allows companies to anticipate their audience's needs and get one (or two or three) steps ahead. Predictive analytics helps brands send smart recommendations about products that certain customers might like, tailor promotions to specific subsets of contacts, and create individualized reminders based on purchasing cadences.

When you anticipate your audience’s needs, you boost engagement and customer retention.

Hyper-Personalized Experiences

AI creates personalized experiences across industries, from ecommerce to nonprofits to real estate. No matter your industry, you can harness the power of generative AI to give your customers or donors a super-personalized experience with your brand.

Here are some ways that organizations use AI to individualize the customer experience:

• Text offers to groups that typically only make a purchase when given a discount code
• Share product or service recommendations that complement past purchases
• Reach out to customers who haven’t purchased from or interacted with the brand in a while as a way to bring them back into the fold
• Understand when certain groups engage with messages and only send texts during those times
• Tailor fundraising outreach to those who will be most willing to donate and/or according to localized concerns and values

As you can see, AI can hyper-personalize your customers’ experience with your brand, which can help boost conversion rates and increase your SMS marketing ROI.

Conversational AI

Conversational AI uses natural language processing to process, understand, and respond to human-made prompts. With this definition, it’s probably easy to assume how conversational AI fits into SMS marketing. It can be an automated text message marketing feature, creating, receiving, and processing texts from your audience, then simulating a human-sounding conversation.

Businesses can use this feature as an AI message generator, which writes sample text messages you can send customers. Another way to apply conversational AI in your SMS campaign is by using it to interact with customers with two-way texting. In this way, the text conversation generator acts like a chatbot or virtual assistant, helping people who contact your brand via text by answering questions, providing resources, tracking an order, etc.

What are the benefits of using conversational AI in text message marketing? The benefits of conversational AI in text message marketing are improved customer service through automated two-way texting, better customer satisfaction with faster text replies, and optimized time for your marketing team. Instead of your team replying to every single message that comes its way, conversational AI technology can evaluate customer intent, pushing only the more complex questions to your team’s inbox.

Text Message Automation

Automated text message marketing means you can trigger specific messages to be sent when certain actions are taken. While all these AI examples incorporate text automation, we’ll highlight specific automated actions that AI can assist with.

• Appointment reminders: Set it and forget it with AI for appointment and event reminders. Generative AI text solutions allow your business to reduce no-shows by reminding customers about what’s ahead in their schedule. Plus, you can incorporate conversational AI so that if someone needs to reschedule, they can do so via text.
• Reservations: Similar to appointment reminders, let customers know about upcoming reservations. AI automation can personalize these reminder campaigns by adding specific reservation details for each SMS recipient.
• Order tracking: With AI, order tracking is simplified and seamless for customers, who can receive real-time purchase updates.
• Product recommendations: As mentioned above, product recommendations can be automated with AI, which can assess past purchases and suggest complementary items to keep customers coming back. Customers will appreciate this white-glove service because they don’t have to search for products — the products come to them.
• Follow-up texts: Whether you need to send an abandoned cart message, a donation thank you, or a post-customer-service survey, AI can ensure that the right people receive relevant texts at the best times. Learn more about how to send the perfect follow-up texts.

Tips for Using AI in Text Marketing

At this point, you might wonder, “What are some common concerns about using AI in text message marketing?” Some common concerns are transparency, compliance, and ethics.

Follow these SMS marketing best practices for incorporating AI into your campaign strategies.

Be Transparent

Transparency builds trust. While consumers acknowledge that AI is used in marketing outreach and will continue to be leveraged in the future, 78% want to know if the technology is used in their interactions with brands. This means that customers still want human-forward interactions for businesses.

One way that brands can maintain trust is by clearly indicating that AI powers a text conversation. This will put customers’ minds at ease and help reduce skepticism around this constantly evolving tech. The more your contacts encounter helpful, engaging, and accurate uses of AI-automated text message marketing, the more they’ll be amenable to it.

Be Compliant

In text marketing, compliance is key — and AI can help. Use your AI message generator to write texts with opt-in consent requests and opt-out information. Similarly, you can ensure that automated texts are only sent within the TCPA-regulated hours, typically between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Be Ethical

Ethics with AI is a hot topic and one that is worthy of discussion as technology continues to evolve. Are there any ethical considerations when using AI in marketing? Yes, there are ethical considerations when using AI in marketing, including data privacy, the potential for bias, and accuracy.

• Privacy: All companies must follow federal and state privacy laws when protecting consumer data.
• The potential for bias: AI technology uses machine-learning algorithms and models based on human data, which invites room for bias. Make sure that your AI predictive models are treating all customer segments equally.
• Accuracy: Even though AI reduces the risk of human error, it’s not always accurate. Marketing and communication teams must introduce human review of all AI-generated content. Accuracy is one of the many reasons to have human supervision of your AI message generator.

Taking the First Step in Your AI-Powered Text Marketing Journey

If you’re thinking, “How can I get started using AI for text message marketing?” Stay right here. You can follow these steps to get started.

Choose the Right Text Marketing Platform

Your AI text marketing journey begins with your SMS platform. Ensure that your text marketing solution supports AI workflows and features to streamline internal processes and simplify personalization.

With automated text message marketing features, an AI text generator AI Compose, and Team Inbox  for conversational AI, EZ Texting is your one-stop shop for all things AI and text marketing. Your brand can start transforming customer interactions with more tailored approaches, faster reply speeds, and personalization at scale. Plus, EZ Texting supports AI integrations to make your SMS campaign process much more manageable.

Train Employees

Although your AI solutions will do a lot of the hard work for you, you’ll still need to train the teams using them. The benefit of training employees on AI is two-fold: (1) it familiarizes them with the technology so they can use it for peak performance, and (2) knowing more about AI can help reduce the fears around it.

Start Small

Some businesses think that when it comes to adopting AI tools, it’s all or nothing. But that’s not necessarily the case. You can start small by experimenting with one AI tool, and once your team gets familiar with it, add another tool. It’s also important to remember that not all AI tools are created equal. If it’s not working for your biz, try something new!

Track Results

Seeing how AI boosts customer experience is crucial for understanding its performance. You’re probably wondering, “What metrics should I track to measure the success of AI-powered text campaigns?” Here are the metrics you should track to measure the success of AI-powered text campaigns:

• Opt-outs 
• Click-through rates 
• Conversions 
• Customer feedback 
• Speed of customer service replies

But tracking metrics should also go hand in hand with A/B testing. With A/B testing, you can test different versions of the same message, understand how sending texts at different times affects engagement, and more. This step is extremely helpful for AI-powered SMS campaigns to determine what’s working and what’s not.

Refine Your Strategies

Use your learnings from tracking metrics and conducting A/B testing to tweak your SMS strategy. As you learn more about your customers, their preferences and behaviors, and how they’re engaging with your AI personalization tactics, you’ll be able to craft more relevant texts, targeted campaigns, and a more delightful customer experience.

The Future Is Personal: Embracing AI for Text Marketing Success

Ready to get started with AI-automated text message marketing? The opportunities for enhanced personalization are at your fingertips.

To explore more into generative AI for text marketing, start a 14-day free trial today!