How to improve customer engagement with personalized text messages

Today, over 60% of customers engage with your brand through multiple social media platforms. This makes investing in customer engagement necessary for your business’s success.

Fortunately, text message is an effective way to achieve a higher level of engagement among your audience. People are using their mobile phones all the time, so if you can provide value and get customers to constantly check if you sent a message, you’ll have a lifelong buyer.

In this mini guide, we’ll show you how to improve customer engagement with personalized text messages while looking at some personalized message examples.

Why send personalized text messages?

But what’s the point of personalized text messages? In short, you can expect the following benefits: 

• Boost conversions 
• Save money
• Increase brand engagement

1. Boost conversions

The main reason why businesses are investing in personalized marketing more than ever is that it boosts conversions.

You can use a customer’s buying behaviors and patterns to predict the products that they are most interested in. From here, all you have to do is present this product compellingly, increasing conversions.

2. Save money

The pandemic forced businesses to cut marketing costs. But this doesn’t mean your campaigns need to be less effective. 

By running text message marketing campaigns tailored to a customer’s needs and buying history, you won’t have to spend much on pay-per-click and social media ads. Sending them personalized offers via SMS costs little to no money.

3. Increase brand engagement

Personalization also boosts customer engagement, a crucial part of marketing success. When customers take part in your surveys, sign up for your sweepstakes, or click on your blog posts and online videos, you’re a daily part of their lives.

For example, if you sell jeans and your prospect needs a new pair, they’re more likely to buy from the brand they’ve been engaging with daily. They might even tell their friends and family about your educational articles and high-quality products.

5 ways to improve customer engagement with personalized text messages

Consider these five strategies when trying to improve customer engagement with text messages:

1. Encourage customers to take surveys
2. Collect reviews
3. Keep it fun
4. Be educational and entertaining first
5. Run a sweepstake contest

1. Encourage customers to take surveys

Before you can send personalized text messages, it’s important to understand your customer. So encourage them to participate in your surveys by using incentives like exclusive discounts, free upgrades, and bonus products.

Once your audience has taken your survey, you now have valuable customer data that you can use to personalize the rest of the customer experience.

2. Collect reviews

Online reviews affect 88% of customers’ buying decisions. So if you have no online reviews and a potential customer is deciding between buying from you or another brand, it’s safe to say this customer will choose the competition.

But what if your social pages were filled with thousands of positive reviews? The social proof alone will be enough for a prospect to choose you, even if your price is higher.

So if you want to improve customer engagement, you need to send customers a short message prompting them to review your product online. This creates engagement, and you’ll receive valuable feedback about your product or service, allowing you to improve.

3. Keep it fun

Text messages aren’t like email. You’ll have to be a little more professional when sending an email newsletter.

So when writing personalized text messages, write with more personality. This means cracking jokes, asking rhetorical questions, and adding GIFs and short videos. This hooks your customers’ attention, telling them you’re a fun brand and promoting engagement.

4. Be educational and entertaining first

The biggest mistake businesses make when writing text messages is selling immediately. This is the easiest way to get customers to block your number. Instead, be educational and entertaining. You could write two or three lines helping customers with a problem related to your industry.

By offering titbits of information, you gain the customer’s trust. Link to some articles and social media pages and encourage them to sign up for your email newsletter. Once you’ve got customers engaging with your brand, feel free to send promotional text messages.

5. Run a sweepstakes contest

Another way to improve customer engagement is to run sweepstakes once a year. You could give a large prize to one subscriber or smaller prizes to everyone. However, it’s essential to implement some best practices like:

• Creating urgency
• Giving away a valuable prize—not something worth a few dollars
• Having a low bar to entry
• Collaborating with another brand to cross-promote

Personalized mass text messaging made easy with Lytics

Text message marketing allows you to boost conversions, save money, and increase brand engagement. Unfortunately, most businesses aren’t utilizing personalized text messages to their full potential because the data they use to make marketing decisions is unorganized and confusing.

This is where Lytics can help. The Lytics customer data platform streamlines the entire customer data collection and cleaning process, creating a 360-degree customer experience. So if you’re looking to set your personalized message campaign up for success, sign up for a free Lytics trial.