5 Hyper-Personalization Techniques Every Retailer Should Try in Their SMS Marketing Campaigns

What is Hyper-Personalization?

Hyper-personalization is a new concept that responds to changing customer perceptions and market conditions at a granular level to increase customer experience and brand loyalty.

According to a Garner survey, companies will be competing mostly on a customer experience basis by 2020. So, offering hyper-personalized customer experiences will be the new norm. Failure to provide this will make consumers switch brands.

Firstly, let’s established that there is a difference between personalization and customization. The guys from Tower Data explain it very well in this article.

Source: TowerData

To better understand what hyper-personalization is, first, we must experience it. So, let’s think of a couple of examples when we had hyper-personalized customer experiences. Maybe when you personalized our car to your desired level of attention, or when you received the discount code for your dream pair of shoes, in a direct message on Instagram, right after you got paid, two weeks before your birthday party that you’ve been planning for a month.

So, yes, it’s the feeling of believing that a product is made especially for you. It’s the feeling that successful organizations will deliver to their customers again and again.

Hyper-Personalized Marketing

Chief marketing officers are under immense pressure to adapt to the ever-changing customer behaviours and expectations. Before, a robust digital marketing strategy was enough. Now, their biggest challenge is to be innovative and create more authentic customer interactions. With competition getting smarter in oversaturated industries, data gets more detailed, new channels become more popular, and consumer expectations become more complex.

So, how can retailers win? They need to harness the power of artificial intelligence and data analytics to create hyper-personalized marketing strategies. One area included as part of the strategy is brand-customer communications.

Another challenge that all CMOs and Marketing Managers experience is elevating the customer experience such as:

• in-moment customer journeys
• omnichannel strategies
• 24/7 personalized customer service
• real-time customer segmentation
• dynamic landing pages and websites

VoiceSage found brands delivering a more individualized customer experience use hyper-personalization techniques. They are used when attracting prospects, onboarding new customers, and sending personalized communications and pricing.

How to Create Hyper-Personalized Text Messages

One example that brands can explore hyper-personalization techniques is to move from communication with customers to conversations with customers. Conversational AI combines advanced natural language processing with powerful machine learning to make automated conversations feel human and personal.

Let’s see how some of the hyper-personalized messages look like in different customer engagement stages.

1.     Custom Advertising

Make sure you segment your audience by filters and demographics to apply hyper-personalization techniques. Make sure that your messaging and offers are relevant to the individual customer, not a mass of customers.

2.     Unique mobile landing pages

87% of consumers surveyed say that personally relevant branded content positively influences how they feel about a brand. Enhance your plain SMS messages with beautiful branded mobile landing pages or rich media messages. Add compelling CTA, images, videos, interactive content, digital scratch cards, and more to take your SMS marketing to the next level.

3.     Service chatbots

70% of customers who contact customer service attempt self-service during their resolution journey, but only 9% are wholly contained within self-service. People are always looking for proactive solutions to solve their issues. Conversational messaging delivers end-to-end automation of tasks, actions, and business processes which aims to solve customer issues without human interaction.

4.     Real-time product notifications

Capture lost sales or increase new product awareness by sending real-time product notifications via SMS. This is a great opportunity to let your customers know when the products they were interested in are back in stock, or a new collection is on the way.

5.     Loyalty programs and re-engagement

The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5% to 20%, according to Markinblog. This makes sense as people are more responsive to brands that are already engaged with them because of the familiarity.

Hyper-Personalization Mistakes to Avoid

Even though hyper-personalized text messages could lead to increase customer satisfaction and repeated sales, there are a few things that could also go wrong. Here are a few things to be mindful of:

• Don’t overshare. People are smart, especially digital savvy and Generation Z. Sharing too much information about the data you collected about them will put them off and you are risking losing customers, or even worse, questioning regarding data privacy.
• Don’t overdo it. Too much brand clinginess makes you appear desperate. Customers will see the oddness and annoyance in your tone of voice, so choose your words wisely. Also, don’t send notifications every single week. Your customers will more likely unsubscribe.
• Keep your information updated. There is nothing more embarrassing than getting the customer information wrong. Wrong title, wrong name, wrong telephone number, email address, or any other purchasing details you have on them. So, make sure the information in your customer database stays updated. To stay relevant you need to check in with your customers regularly.

Final Thoughts on Hyper-Personalization

We hope that you can use the five hyper-personalization techniques suggested to increase customer experience and sales. With the Golden Quarter fast approaching, and the customer shopping behaviour-changing drastically, we know retailers and marketers could use a bit of help with strategic marketing communications.

If you want to scale up conversations without scaling up costs, then get in touch with VoiceSage. We will help you create conversations that are automatic, hyper-personal, emphatic, and offer real-time customer service.