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Why Your Business Should be Using SMS Marketing

A person holding a smart phone receiving SMS marketing

Alongside social media and email, SMS is one of the best marketing tools businesses should be using today. While SMS lacks the visuals of other marketing techniques, it leverages a powerful and wide-reaching network for immediate communication with your customers and audience. That means SMS is one of the most powerful tools for growing your business’ reach and retention. We’ll explain in more detail why your business should be sending your customers texts.

SMS is a Powerful Marketing Channel

SMS or texting is simply one of the best ways to communicate with your customers and clients. Over 5 billion people in the world have mobile phones and another billion at least have access to one. In Canada, over 88% of the population has their own smartphone and over 45% check their phone at least every half-hour. Plus, unlike apps or other communication methods, phone users rarely silent or mute their text notifications. This combination means SMS offers a reliable marketing and communication channel with an incomparable reach.

Customers Like SMS

A powerful communication method means little if people don’t like using it. Thankfully, that’s not the case for SMS. Instead, customers prefer SMS communication to other methods, particularly phone calls. That’s not just for friends and family either. Over 93% of customers want businesses to communicate to them through SMS texts. That preference and the direct contact to users’ phones has incredible results, with SMS messages averaging at staggering 98% open and 45% response rates. This makes it both an extremely efficient and cost-effective marketing channel.

The Convenience of Automatic Updates 

There are numerous platforms for SMS messaging like Klaviyo that include automations. These can be used to update customers about their packages, orders, or appointments. Automatic cart reminders or new product/service announcements through SMS are also perfect for helping to drive sales and foster retention. The immediacy of these updates is convenient for customers and their automation requires little-to-no input from your business to send. SMS updates can be tied directly into your ecommerce platform just like emails. This will easily allow you to send updates on either or even both powerful marketing channels.

Customer Service

Over the past decade of long holds and confusing phone menus, people have developed a distaste for customer service call centers. As a result, chat and text forms of customer service have become their preference. These don’t require customers waiting on hold and can be done at the same time as work or another task. As a result, SMS offers customers more flexibility and they feel their personal schedule is respected. SMS customer service is also beneficial for businesses who can automate simple requests or questions. This allows staff to address more complicated issues more quickly. This is especially useful in SMS, because people and your business can communicate with each other without relying on cellular data.

Getting Feedback

Texting is convenient, which is why we all tend to communicate with our friends and family through SMS. That’s the same reason why SMS is great for businesses to collect feedback from their customers. Simple messages that ask customers to rank a previous product or to answer a poll require only a numerical response, which customers can send in a second. In turn, your business collects valuable customer feedback. The same convenience is also great for getting customer confirmations or any other quick responses.

Perfect for Simple and Direct Communication

SMS is not as versatile as some other marketing channels. It can’t include high resolution images, easy to click buttons, or lengthy text. While that can be a limitation of SMS generally, it’s also a key factor for its marketing success. Its simplicity and concision make it perfect for quick and direct communication that can still impact its audience. Not every message you send customers or audience needs to be lengthy to generate buzz and sales. Ads are also sometimes only a sentence or two, and yet can still generate impressive returnsfor your business.

The Power of SMS is Right at Your Fingertips

You should now have a good sense of why SMS is a powerful marketing tool for any business. It leverages the power of a wide communication network that can be found at nearly everyone’s fingertips. Using SMS will help your business grow its reach while providing customers with convenience. If you’re ready to start incorporating SMS into your digital marketing strategy, looking to optimize your messaging, or want to learn more, be sure to contact our marketing team at Rosewood.

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Personalizing for Relevance: How AI is Transforming Customer Experiences

Woman with gray hair having a personalized customer experience on her computer thanks to help from AI

We’re continuing to see the many powerful applications for AI. Along with potentially useful creative tools, AI excels at data collection and parsing. Now, we’re seeing that algorithmic power combine with marketing expertise to create a personalized and relevant customer experiences for small businesses. Rosewood will explain what personalization and relevance in marketing are, and how AI is a powerful tool for a marketing team to create personally relevant marketing for any customer or client experiences.

Personalization, Relevancy, and AI in Marketing

Personalization has been a major tool in marketing for over a decade. It emphasizes marketing that communicates personally to the individual members of your audience over broader, more general marketing campaigns that lack a specific target. While this might include one-off custom communications or exchanges, it can also be automated. For example, emails or messages can automatically address receivers by their first names. 

Overall, customers have come to expect personalized experiences that respect their individuality and interests. At least 71% of customers expect a personalized experience, and a greater 76% are frustrated when they don’t have one. Personalization has also demonstrated an average 10-15% revenue lift, which increases to 25% for direct to consumer businesses. These individualized experiences create stronger personal connections, which lead to more customers and clients returning for more purchases and services. This is where small businesses can excel over larger companies that typically provide more generalized customer experiences.

Thanks to AI, more complex and valuable data can be gathered from users to create even more personalized marketing that is relevant to customers’ interests and experiences. This is why relevancy has become an essential marketing criterion alongside personalization. These algorithms and AI automations can consider browsing history, page time, social media data, and more. Marketers can then use this information and tell these programs how to generate product recommendations, personalized notifications, curated packages, communications, and more. These AI help your business understand the true, individual interests of each of your customers so that any marketing that reaches them is relevant.  

Where AI Can Help with Personalization and Relevancy

As we’ve covered before, AI is a general term. It’s recently become the common title for various programs which can learn from data to accomplish more complex tasks. For personalized and relevant marketing, these AI can sift through an overwhelming amount of user information that would take far more time for a human. That’s why AI is a powerful tool for small businesses who usually won’t be able to dedicate a person to poring through this information. Instead, AI is a valuable tool for your marketing team to build effective strategies for relevant marketing campaigns. We’ll go over some of the most effective uses of AI in personalized marketing.

E-Commerce Tracking

When customers are on your website or digital store, AI software can track what they browse and for how long. It will also track any purchases, wishlisting, shares, etc. This tracking isn’t especially new, but more developments in machine learning allow AI to start grouping and interpreting the data. All that behavioral information from many customers, allows an AI to develop customer groups and profiles according to their interests and various other demographics like age and area. These can then be used for a plethora of personalized and relevant marketing strategies.

Relevant Email Marketing

With this detailed profile generation, AI can then begin to automatically message subscribed customers about product recommendations or send communications that are more relevant to their interests. This will still require a human to create and design the message and templates. However, the AI can take over the busy work of adding appropriate products and sending the emails off. 

Your marketing team can also use these AI-generated profiles to analyze your audience and segment your email recipients to start creating emails more relevant to each group’s interests. This will lead to more opens and clicks, since they will better grab your audience’s attention. Again, AI can’t quite handle the creation process itself. Human expertise is still necessary for effective personalized marketing.

Personalized Website Customer Experiences

By tracking their ecommerce behavior, AI incorporated into your site can start to tailor customers’ website experience to be more relevant. Products listed on the front page or recommended to them at other browsing stages can be specified to their personal interests. This keeps them in your store and more likely to purchase, since they will continue to see what is relevant to their interests in your business.

Personalized Chatbots

Customer service is an important part of your daily, individualized marketing, and instant messaging through your website, social media, and SMS has become a fundamental customer service tool. Those messages can also be overwhelming and chatbots can help manage the flood. However, they are also often robotic and simple. Current advances in AI famously happening with Chat-GPT and Google Bard are allowing chat bots to accomplish more complex tasks and communications. They can address the customer by name, and even potentially pull up their profile’s information. They aren’t quite at the level of replacing a human’s social finesse or able to handle more complex inquiries. However, they have made great strides where simple interactions can be accomplished entirely automatically for a pleasant and personalized customer experience.

Don’t Forget About Human Expertise

AI technology is currently surging in its development and it’s still hard to see where it will end up in the coming months and years. It’s already showing it’s a powerful tool for personalized marketing, but don’t let it completely override the human touch of your business either. Ultimately, personalized connections are human ones, and customers want that human connection with your business. Similarly, AI is still limited in its abilities. Analyzing information, writing messages, creating visual content, and more still require human ingenuity and expertise. If you want to talk more about how you can strategize and incorporate AI into your digital marketing, ecommerce, or web design, be sure to contact Rosewood Marketing.

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The Need to Know on AI-Generated Content

A robot using a phone and writing in a notebook with a pen.

If you’ve spent any time on social media or the internet at large lately, you’ve seen AI (artificial intelligence) has become a hot topic. Services like ChatGPT and DALL-E2 and their AI generated content have been featured in countless articles and posts. These conversations aren’t about a malicious AI like Skynet, HAL 9000, the Cylons, or Ultron of science fiction. Instead, these AI are learning programs currently in development that have become capable of generating creative content like images, art, and text. Naturally, this has created a lot of discussion about the capabilities, uses, and ethics of these kinds of programs. Rosewood Marketing is here to help you get caught up with everything you need to know about AI-generated content.

What is AI?

Let’s start with the basic: what is AI? AI in science fiction has typically referred to fully sentient artificial beings, usually computers, androids, or robots. These are not the AI were dealing with in reality… yet. Instead, AI currently refers to programs that use machine learning to more effectively complete tasks. These programs “learn” by running training data through algorithms to learn concepts and associations. They then make decisions or predictions without needing direct programming. These algorithms are now used in numerous places such as search engines, photo editing, web design, recommendation systems, language translation, chatbots, and far more. The technology has proved vital in being able to parse the massive amount of data now available on the internet. 

The Need to Know on AGI (Artificial Generative Intelligence)

Most major tech companies currently have their own AI development projects and divisions, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, etc. These are for various applications, most of which are primarily still for backend services. Typically, users don’t directly engage with or realize they are using AI programs. 

Generative AI, however, are ones the wider public has more actively interacted with lately and are responsible for the wave of AI generated content. These AIs are designed to generate visual, audio, or textual content based on user inputs. OpenAI is currently one of the recognized industry leaders in developing generative AIs. They’re responsible for both ChatGPT and DALL-E2, whose respective text and image generations have been all over the internet lately. OpenAI’s technology has also been used in partnership by Microsoft, who is currently using it for developing a “new Bing.” Nor is OpenAI alone. Midjourney is another major image generating AI that has become popular.

These programs accept textual prompts or commands and then generate content in response. Overall, the current general interest comes from both programs’ adequate ability to fulfill those requests. The sudden popularity is the result of OpenAI and other services recently making the programs available to the public. ChatGPT is currently free to use for its research and development, while Dall-E2 and Midjourney comes with a set of free uses with more available for purchase. 

Benefits of AI Generated Content

The benefits of AI generated content are immediately clear. With simple prompts users can create full pieces of text, lines of programming code, a sound bite of a person’s voice saying a specific phrase, or custom visual art faster than a human could ever produce and without that effort. The sudden impact of AI generated content is because of its immediately impressive ability to generate content from simple commands. These AI can greatly benefit content creation by speeding up the process and reducing human workload. Imagine being able to just give the prompt “Write a blog telling me everything I need to know about AI generated content” and getting a full article like this in a few seconds.

Drawbacks of AI Generated Content

That, at least, is the ideal. A lot of work needs to be done before AI generated content, replaces human creators, if ever. It is true that the creations of generative AI are already staggeringly impressive. While these AI are quite capable at creating certain kinds of art or texts, they immediately falter at more complex tasks. AI generations of humans have become infamous for their monstrous hands. CNET had recently used AI to write its articles, but after a review found more than half of those articles had serious errors, they paused further use. AI can only generate content as well as they have been trained, and right now AI generation remains at a stage that is an advanced technological parrot. It’s ability to create is impressive, but it does not actually “know” what it’s doing.

Where will AI generated content go?

Currently AI generated content isn’t quite up to par with human creativity and expertise. For simple tasks, however, AI are already producing staggering results. Along with the need for additional development, there are also current ethical concerns and debates about these generative AI. They have been trained on a wide set of creations by artists who did not give explicit permission for this machine training. As a result, AI generated content has raised debates about whether these programs are stealing from other human creators. That has only become more complicated with concerns that these AI will replace human artists and creators. 

On the other hand, AI generated content can be a powerful creative tool. Artists have been using generative AI in their work for decades, such as Harold Cohen’s AARON. Ultimately, creators and industries will adapt to how AI generated content develops and can be most effectively used. It’s a powerful tool, and just like any new tool, it needs to settle into its appropriate uses. If you’re interested in current AI applications for your business’ website, check out this blog and contact our web design team. You can also discuss with Rosewood’s marketing team about the current uses of AI generated content in marketing.

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