Generative AI for SMS Marketing & Customer Engagement
Welcome to the future of SMS marketing: generative AI! Learn more about why you need generative AI for SMS marketing to boost audience engagement, acquisition, and retention.
Generative AI for SMS marketing is here, and its benefits, operational challenges, and everyday uses for nurturing target audience engagement and mobilizing action at scale can’t be denied.
We are entering a new world. The technologies of machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding are reaching a nexus of capability. The end result is that we’ll soon have artificially intelligent assistants to help us in every aspect of our lives.
— Amy Stapleton | Conversational AI, Voice, Agetech
Well said, Ms. Stapleton. While we’ve not yet reached iRobot status, with AI assisting humans in all aspects of life and work, we’re definitely in a whole new world.. For example, generative AI tools have already entered the workplace, with a recent survey indicating that 29% of Gen Z, 28% of Gen X, and 27% of Millennial respondents are already using generative AI tools in the office.
You may hardly notice AI comfortably doing work for us daily, from unlocking our phones and triggering payment points with facial recognition, to hopping in self-driving Teslas, our banking systems, and more.
So what exactly is generative AI for SMS marketing, and why should it appeal to the opportunity of small business owners and nonprofits seeking to improve everything from operations and online customer experience to retention rates and ROI. Keep reading, and learn more!
What Is Generative AI for SMS Marketing?
Generative AI is used in SMS marketing to create personalized messages, automated marketing campaigns, and targeted marketing campaigns. Generative AI is designed to learn patterns, structures, and characteristics from a dataset and then use that knowledge to generate new data—in this case an SMS message—more popularly known as "language modeling." These models can create new text, images, videos, audio, or other types of content that mimic the original dataset's style, distribution, and characteristics.
Also known as "generative modeling"—a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on creating new data or content rather than predicting or classifying existing data—generative AI involves training machine learning models to generate unique output (here, SMS messages) that resemble a given dataset. A dataset usually consists of text or image data, which is an example to teach the machine learning algorithm how to make predictions.
How Does Generative AI Work for SMS Marketing?
Generative AI empowers businesses like yours to automate and streamline the process of creating SMS marketing content, saving you heaps of time and operational effort while delivering impactful messages to those who matter to you the most.
How? By merging machine learning and human datasets to produce personalized and contextually relevant SMS messages to automatically engage, respond, or resonate with your customers, supporters, donors, sponsors, volunteers, or staff on behalf of your business or organization.
This process begins by inputting a prompt or initial message to the AI model. The model then uses its language structures (including grammar and spelling), and contextual understanding to generate responses to customers. The automatically generated content can be personalized, engaging, and tailored to your target audience or SMS marketing campaign objectives.
Generative AI for SMS Marketing Benefits
In 2022, large-scale generative AI adoption was 23%. By 2025, large-scale adoption of AI is expected to reach 46%. The reason more brands and organizations across a spectrum of industries—retail, nonprofits, education, hospitality,real estate, technology, and healthcare—are turning to generative AI for SMS marketing comes down to the robust benefits awaiting those who implement this cutting-edge tool, including:
- Automated Messaging Personalization: Trained generative AI incorporates customer names, previous purchase information, or other relevant details to create messages that feel tailored and relevant to each recipient, without you and or your team manually having to reference, draft a response, approve, and send.
- Intelligent Content Generation: Depending on the “inputs” (customer data) used to train any given generative AI, it can generate SMS text messages tailored to individual customers, taking into account granular shopper details that matter most to your business, such as preferences, behaviors, purchase history, and more.
- Enhanced Creativity & Topical Reach: Struggling to gain creative inspiration for your next big SMS text marketing campaign? There’s a generative AI for that. This modern-day creative assistant can help your team by analyzing large amounts of data and generating new concepts that help you break through creative barriers and enable explorations of new messaging strategies. Win-win.
- Improved Customer Experience: Generative AI breathes new life into your customer service and staff management because text messages from your business or organization can now be even more contextually relevant and engaging for recipients. The combination of speed, deliverability, and personalization makes generative AI for SMS marketing a key to enhancing the overall customer experience regardless of your industry.
- Faster A/B Testing Capabilities: As previously stated, generative AI for SMS marketing is trained using finite language and conversational parameters. That means your outreach team(s) can rapidly create multiple versions of messages for promotions, notifications, products, or events, and test them against target audience segments to identify the most effective messaging strategies.
- Sustainable, Scalable & Consistent: As you continue using EZ Texting, the volume of SMS text messages you send will grow, and maintaining consistency in key messaging components like your style, tone, and branding guidelines is critical to driving brand integrity and awareness. The goal is to remain consistent across many messages, and generative AI for SMS marketing gets it done while saving you heaps of time in the process.
Using Generative AI for SMS Marketing to Connect
Personalized Recommendations: Continuously analyzing customer data, including preference, purchase history, and browser behavior, enables generative AI systems to suggest products or services aligned with target audience preferences in real time.
Abandoned Cart Recovery: If your customers add items to their online shopping cart but fail to complete the purchase, generative AI canstep in to send SMS messages encouraging customers to complete their transaction.
Helpful Event Reminders: As the ultimate virtual assistant, generative AI aids organizations by sending automated event reminders and SMS notifications. Proactively send short bursts of valuable reminder details to drive attendance and cut down on no-shows.
Seasonal Promotions & Limited-Time Offers: Generative AI for SMS marketing helps you take advantage of your busy seasons by expediting your message creation process for seasonal promotions and special holiday offers.
Customer Surveys & Polls: Customer feedback is one of the single-most powerful resources an organization can obtain. The benefits of using generative AI for SMS marketing to gain customer feedback are numerous but primarily include a better understanding of customers, greater customer satisfaction, more referrals, and higher revenue—an effort worth reaching out to target audience over the long term gain to them and your business.
Customer Service & Problem Mitigation: From issue acknowledgments to resolution confirmations, generative AI for SMS marketing opens a direct, secure, and private channel with your audience to provide timely and proactive communication.
Challenges of Using Generative AI for SMS Marketing
The challenges of using generative AI for SMS marketing include algorithmic bias, impacts on the workforce, the hazards of misuse, and obstacles related to AI’s technical complexity.
Using generative AI for SMS marketing also poses several other challenges, including:
- Over-Reliance on Generative AI: Effective generative AI for SMS marketing balances AI technology and proper human judgment. When decision-making processes rely solely on generative AI, context, deep insights, and basic errors can frequently result.
- Remaining Compliant: To grow your business using SMS text marketing, regulatory compliance with laws such as the TCPA or GDPR must live at the nucleus of your communication strategies, requiring consent and opt-out mechanisms to communicate with target audiences.
- Branding Consistency: Maintaining the quality, relevance, and authenticity of generated content can be difficult, as trained AI models can and frequently do produce grammatically incorrect or off-brand messages. Human review and editing is best practice to avoid cringe moments for brands or organizations.
- Lack of Control: Organizations releasing proprietary generative AI solutions to their customers can’t control customer inquiries and, as a result, the input of a given AI. This uncontrolled variable of AI raises concerns about inappropriate or offensive content being produced in response.
- Ethical Considerations: Many on the cusp of integrating generative AI into their communication strategies are concerned with the inherent biases in human data used to train AI models.
- Scaling AI-Generated Messages: Efficiently handling character limitations presents further obstacles to some generative AI models. Factors like maintaining accuracy, coherence, and relevance when generating responses can result in required quality control measures, such as human review and editing, becoming more complex and resource-intensive when implementing large-scale SMS text message campaigns.
Generative AI for SMS Marketing Leads a New Way
In this article, we covered a lot on generative AI for SMS marketing in a little bit of time, but there’s certainly more to come from this developing technology and you may have questions.
Ms. Stapleton’s right about one thing– we are entering a new world. A world where overcoming the current challenges of generative AI involves adhering to regulations, thoroughly testing AI-generate language, combining machine learning technology with intentional human oversight, as well as continuous campaign monitoring and optimization based on your customers’ feedback and robust performance analytics.
If you haven’t already, start a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) to explore EZ Texting’s automation capabilities further. Happy texting!
FAQs
Here are some best practices for using generative AI for SMS marketing to ensure effective and responsible campaign implementation:
- Make sure to define clear objectives.
- Remember to segment your contact list(s).
- Use concise language and short bursts of muscular text.
- Always include human review and editing phases of your messaging rollout.
- Use relevant keywords throughout your messages.
- Personalize your messages as much as possible.
- Continuously monitor AI-generated content performance.
- Based on target audience analytics, test and iterate message variations.
There are several tools and resources available for using generative AI for SMS marketing, including:
- Google Cloud Natural Language API: This API can be used to generate text, translate languages, and answer your questions in an informative way.
- IBM Watson Assistant: This service can build chatbots that naturally interact with your customers.
- Hugging Face: This platform provides numerous open-source tools and resources for using generative AI.
The future of generative AI in SMS marketing is very promising. As generative AI technology continues to develop, we can expect to see even more personalized, engaging, and effective SMS marketing campaigns following some of these potential directions:
- Advanced personalization with increased access to customer data.
- Multinational support via SMS text messaging in different languages.
- Continued creativity and honed messaging around the “human voice.”
- Improved real-time optimization for SMS marketing campaigns beyond customer support.
- A focus on improving ethical considerations.
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