How to personalize SMS messages with dynamic content

Every SMS campaign looks for effective solutions to the objectives outlined in the marketing plan.

Personalized SMS messaging is one of the most useful tools you can use to make your campaign more successful. How to achieve this, is through using dynamic content or tags.

How to personalize SMS messages with dynamic content

Dynamic content allows you to incorporate personal information from a database into SMS messages. Via an SMS platform, information is pulled from a database of contacts to complete the content of the tags contained in the message. It is therefore very important to ensure that the information you have on your list of recipients is up to date, with the fields required for the tags filled out correctly.

With automated personalization of text, the messaging process in an SMS campaign is even more efficient. Use files in formats such as CSV (Excel), which a few SMS platforms for businesses allow you to import in bulk. You could import your contacts list yourself by using copy and paste, but automation will make your SMS campaigns more efficient.    

Using dynamic content allows you to enrich messages in an SMS campaign, and makes the recipient feel more valued and appreciated – you can use their name, birthday or other important dates in the text.

A lot of personal preferences can be relevant to the campaign’s objectives. Carefully choosing your recipients list also helps to make the campaign more relevant.

Generally, fields which are included in the text of an SMS campaign include a name, surname and date of birth, which you can utilize for actions such as wishing the user Happy Birthday.

In order to obtain this useful data, users need to complete previous steps such as signing up to a specific campaign or participating in a loyalty program. It’s very important to pre-design the fields which each user or client has to fill out in their opt-in form.

What information should you ask for on sign up?

Sign up usually occurs before assessing the specific needs of each SMS campaign. Your database will therefore normally include a lot more personal information about the target audience than what will end up being used.

For example, regardless of what the recipient puts as their name, it’s useful to ask for their sex in a different field. When you compose the text of the message, automatization allows us to personalize it according to whether the recipient is male or female.

For segmenting the target audience it is also important to get the user’s home and contact address (such as an email or an alternative phone number), which makes establishing a multi-channel relationship even easier. Although obtaining this data can be relatively difficult, you could include information on the closest POS display to the client in the message, for example, by asking them for their postcode on registration.

Monitoring messages can also be done via fields included inside the text, which establish fixed searches. The dynamic content which SMS platforms incorporate into their services to launch mobile messaging campaigns make sending SMS even more efficient. Moreover, they allow you to establish more direct, personal contact with every person that makes up the target audience for your campaign.