AI SMS: How to Improve Conversions, Sales, and Customer Connection with AI Text Messages

Want to create more engaging SMS campaigns, in less time, and improve your results?

It seems the AI craze is taking over the world. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss AI as another trend, a marketing buzzword. 

But, with AI already being used by nearly 30% of the workforce and with 60% of business owners believing AI will improve customer relationships, it’s one tech trend that’s here to stay. 

AI is going to become an increasingly prevalent part of doing business, especially online.

Like anything, AI is another tool. When used wisely it can save you tons of time while improving the quality of your SMS messages.

So, the question becomes, what is the best way to use AI SMS to supercharge your campaigns?

It’s not as simple as clicking a button. But, with the right strategy and tools you can use AI to help you craft high-converting SMS messages that deliver the results you’re after.

Below we dive deep into what AI SMS actually is, how you can think strategically about its use, and finally show you how you can start using AI throughout your SMS campaigns today. 

What is AI SMS? 

In its current state, AI SMS or AI text messaging is the process of using AI to streamline your SMS marketing. Most of the current AI tools on the market are what’s known as generative AI. You use AI prompts to generate compelling SMS messages you can send to your prospects.

Using AI throughout your SMS campaigns helps you automate and streamline the process of creating SMS content. If you’ve ever been staring at your screen, stuck with what you should message your prospects, then you can let AI remove some of this struggle. 

Keep in mind, we’re in the early days of this revolution too. By introducing AI into your SMS workflows and campaigns today, you’ll start to inch ahead of your competition. 

The Best Ways to Use AI SMS With Your Prospects, Contacts, and Customers

AI tools can do a lot to improve your sales, marketing, and support teams. Overall, how you use AI will depend upon your business goals. For example, do you want to improve existing messages, create new copy from scratch, or simply improve your communication speed across the board?

Here are a few ways you can use AI with your existing customers, new prospects, or client list:

• Create copy for shipping reminders and order confirmation messages
• Quickly craft thoughtful responses to product and service questions
• Write broadcast SMS messages to announce a new sale
• Re-write old SMS sequences and offer message variations to split test
• Come up with great re-engagement and follow-up messages to activate old leads
• And much more!

That’s just on the creation front too. AI can also be used on the foundational level to help you better understand your customers, create in-depth avatars, pinpoint objections, and come up with unique angles for new SMS marketing campaigns.

Building a Strong Foundation to Improve Your AI SMS Results

A lot of business owners and marketing teams are only using 1% of the power that AI offers. AI is like a machine, the results you get are only as good as what you feed into the tool. Think of it like giving instructions to a black box. 

If you’re using a generative AI tool like ChatGPT, or another premium tool, then keep the following tips in mind as you craft your prompts. Prompts are essentially what you give the tool to generate text. They can be questions, commands, and explicit instructions. 

By implementing everything below you’ll end up with SMS messages that’ll lead to improved conversions and more clicks. 

Create Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The messages you generate with AI are only as strong as the information you give it. That’s why we recommend starting by building your ICP. You want to get as close to a living breathing human as possible.

Your ICP will include tangible data you’ve gathered about your customers. This can include survey data on past purchasing behavior, psychographic and demographic data, pain points, job roles, and more.

Here’s an example of what it would look like:

James is currently a customer service team leader in the eCommerce space. His biggest work-related problem is having slow call resolution rates. He attended a product demo and is currently using the freemium version of our product. His team has the budget for our solution but is still in the exploratory phase.

You can obviously make this more in-depth, but see how giving the context to the AI tool first, will help it create a better response. Before you start generating text you can add this to your AI tool of choice.

Your prompt can read something like this:

“Keep the following customer avatar in mind as you generate messages. This is the ideal customer we’re trying to reach. The voice, tone, and content of the messages should speak to this person on a deep and personal level”.

Determine Campaign/Audience Needs and Goals

What are the needs and goals of your audience and how does your product or service help them meet these? When you’re sending out any campaign, think about the one thing you’re helping your audience accomplish or the action you want them to take.

This will help you refine your messaging, so it helps to move your prospects towards that one thing. 

For example, maybe you’re creating a series of messages to get people to register for an upcoming event or webinar. Here, your overall campaign goal will be to drive clicks to your registration page or get users to text to join.

While the content of your webinar will help them meet the challenges they’re currently facing. 

When you’re creating AI prompts you can include your lead goals and needs, along with what you’re hoping to accomplish with each campaign. By including their hopes, dreams, and what they hope to achieve you can ensure your messages motivate people to take action. Every message doesn’t need to have an urgent CTA, but all your marketing messages should be operating with this context in the background. 

Here’s an example of what this could look like:

“We’re creating an SMS campaign to advertise our 48-hour flash sale for Labor day. The goal is to get users who are on the fence to take action and lock in lower pricing. These are people who we’ve engaged with in the last 60 days and they’ve watched some of our webinars, but they haven’t taken action on making a purchase just yet. We know they’re interested in using our software, but we want to remove the price objection and encourage them to take action in this limited window. They still actively have the problem of (insert what your software/business solves), so we want to gently talk about this problem too. I’d like you to generate 10 sample SMS messages we can send. These will be sent within a 48-hour window, so we want them to build and logically follow one another.”

Set the Tone for Your Messages

The tone and voice of your messages are important too. The language used with one customer might completely repel another. You want the voice to be in alignment with your brand voice, while still staying true to the medium of SMS. Short, personal, and fast. 

Luckily, using AI tools makes it easy to quickly change the tone of your SMS messages. All you need to do is ask the tool to re-write your messages using a different voice or tone. Think of it like having a conversation with a friend. 

Here’s are a few examples of how you can :

• “Act as if you’re an expert in (your niche)”
• “The messages should be professional and use a bit of witty humor”
• “Write in a casual tone, while still being authoritative”

You can get creative with this, while still being true to your brand. 

If you want to learn how to change the tone of your SMS messages in a single click, then keep reading. We’ve recently integrated one-click AI tone change functionality into our SMS messaging platform. 

Improve Engagement via Split Testing

Finally, we have user engagement. When left to its own devices a lot of AI responses are, well, robotic. However, you can use simple questions to make your responses more engaging. If you don’t like the responses you’re getting, you simply need to get more specific with your prompts, or continue refining until you get the result you’re after.  

Try out simple question prompts like:

• Can you make this more interesting?
• How can you convey this in fewer words?
• Can we change this, so a third grader can understand? 

Another way to use AI to improve customer engagement is to have it come up with multiple versions of the same message. This gives you different messages you can split test to see what your audience responds to best. 

Split testing is a tried and true way to improve your conversions and convert more leads into customers. We were able to use split testing to increase customer reviews by 125%.

You can even create multiple versions of your winning SMS messages to try to get your conversions, clicks, and responses even higher. 

Imagine how much your conversions will improve by being able to split-test nearly all of the SMS messages you send out. By using AI tools, you can create multiple message variations in seconds.

Common AI SMS Use Cases With Salesmsg AI

Now that you have a better grasp of AI SMS and how it can be used to elevate your SMS marketing campaigns, let’s dive into some real-world applications. 

See, all of the foundational AI SMS work above requires a lot of extra work. Yes, it’s powerful and can transform the way you use SMS. But, not every user wants to spend hours diving deep into ChatGPT.

That’s why we added unique SMS functionality directly into Salesmsg. Instead of using a third-party tool, you can quickly use AI to improve your SMS campaigns with a couple clicks. 

Let’s look at some of the best ways we’re currently using AI to elevate our SMS messaging (or check out some cool Salesmsg resources around AI)

Save Time By Drafting AI Message Responses

Want to respond thoughtfully to marketing and support messages in seconds?

You can use the “Suggest a Response” feature built directly into Salesmsg to draft a response in a single click. Our AI tool will analyze the content and context of an incoming message and generate an in-depth response.

Then, all that you need to do is edit the message to ensure it matches what you’d like to say. 

If you’re not happy with the response, then click “Try Again” and it’ll generate a completely new response for you. This will help improve your response time, while still giving you the ability to create highly personal responses at scale. 

Let AI Double-Check Your Message Phrasing

Did you write a message, but it still doesn’t feel right? Before you click send, let AI work some of its magic first. You can use this feature in a few different ways. 

First, you can enter a simple message and it’ll clean up the message, so it’s more engaging.

Second, you can use it as a glorified spell check. This will make your message more presentable while correcting any typos.  

Use AI to Turn Ideas Into Engaging SMS Messages

Sometimes you have a few ideas for what you want to send, but you’re stuck when it comes to writing the actual messages. All you need to do is add a few keywords that are relevant to your message and click the “Expand My Message” button.

The tool will get to work and create an SMS message that aligns with the keywords you typed in. You’re also welcome to edit the generated message to ensure that it remains on brand.

Fine-Tune Your Tone to Speak to Your Target Audience

When it comes to any written medium the tone of your message is crucial. 

It means the difference between a message that deeply resonates with your contact and gets them to respond or take action, or a message that misses the mark completely. 

Luckily, you can easily change the tone of your message, while keeping the content of the message the same. You can either make your message more friendly or make it more formal. 

Need Some Inspiration? Check Out Our 29 Curated SMS Examples

That's right we used AI to generate 29 tailored SMS messages based on specific scenarios!

How Salesmsg's AI Tool Helps Re-humanize Your SMS & Conversations

Texting is one of the fastest and most convenient ways to communicate with your audience. Whether texting is already deeply embedded in your marketing, sales, and support workflows, or you’re just getting started, AI SMS can help.

Sometimes a second set of eyes and a new perspective is all you need to improve your messaging. With AI you’re essentially getting a supercomputer embedded with the entire world’s knowledge.

Salesmsg’s AI tool helps you start using AI throughout your SMS messages in seconds. Sure, you can use additional AI tools if you’d like. 

But, all it takes is a couple of clicks to create compelling messages your audience loves to open and respond to.

The great thing about AI SMS is that it’s only the beginning. The use cases we highlighted above are simply the jumping-off point for using AI to enhance every part of your SMS marketing. 

Don't be afraid of AI, embrace it and grow with it.

Click here to get started with AI SMS today and elevate the quality of every text message you send.