One of the key aspects of mobile marketing is personalization. Tailoring a message to appeal directly to each subscriber is a growing requirement. The explosion of data analysis and the multi-variate attributes that can be associated with a subscriber has resulted in greater opportunities for marketing communication to be made more specific. SMS has to adapt to encompass this new flexibility. There are two distinct types of personalization:
- Adjusting the message with a user’s personal details.
- Creating tailored groups specific to certain criteria using data mining, such as using SQL type language to analyse your repositories in order to retrieve valuable nuggets of data.
This post briefly outlines the differences and benefits of both. Please note, any groups that would be created or subscribers sent to would have to be registered as opted-in, within your data resources.
Category 1:
For unique messaging you may include distinctly personal items such as the subscriber’s firstname as the unique tag such as:
Hi ^ [Insert tag] Thank you for dining with SeaViewGlowBeansBurrenCafe. Please display this 10% M-Coupon at the Cashier for an automatic reduction on your next coffee.
Or you can take personalization a step further by including multiple items of uniqueness, such a user’s loyalty purchasing credits account balance:
Hi ^ [Insert tag] Your loyalty credits balance is now ^^ [Insert tag]
What these messages do, is directly capture a subscriber’s attention- instead of something generic, they see their name, or whatever tag that they can relate to, directly providing them information.
Category 2:
There is so much more you can do now to personalize a message (a lot of which has been covered in previous blog posts) in order to target a specific audience and maximize your mobile marketing budget. Always with the intention of increasing your footfall and your marketing’s return-on-investment (ROI). In order to accomplish this, you would need to analyse your own repositories (such as databases, point of sale data devices and spreadsheets) to generate lists, but it is a valuable exercise. The means of this retrieval have been covered in previous posts so will not be lingered on here.
For example, you could check for what the main item category a user purchases so you can create groups around that interest. Or you can delve into what time do they collect their coffee (on the way to work, for example between 7am-9am) or in the evening after work (5pm-7pm). Thus, you can tailor messages for those times, offering promotions for food suitable to that time period. Another benefit of personalization would be to check for location and create groups around people’s proximity to your stores. Thus, maximizing the potential of footfall and not wasting your budget.
There are literally countless way in which you can intelligently create your messages and groups now to ensure that your are maximizing the potential of broadcasts. Just remember the 3Ps: Precise (keep the message clear, direct), Personalize (make the message relevant to the subscriber), Plain (avoid SMS abbreviations, text emoticons etc.- these can lead to misinterpretation and sometimes are not translated properly on phones, in essence avoid ambiguity to maximize your message’s clarity).
Using Text Messages/SMS/Mobile Marketing in Business 