Bulk SMS vs. Personalized SMS: Which Is Better for Engagement?

Learn when and how to use bulk SMS vs. personalized SMS campaigns.

SMS marketing is a great channel for all types of communications, from bulk promotional and transactional SMS blasts to personalized ongoing conversations.

You can take advantage of the immediacy and simplicity of bulk SMS messaging for time-sensitive promotions and increase your sales.

Also, SMS lets you communicate with each customer on a personal level and increase your customer loyalty.

The question is when you have to use bulk SMS and when you need to personalize your text messages. If you don’t use them correctly, you might waste your time and money without reaching a high SMS marketing ROI.

In this blog post, we’ll explain the main differences between bulk SMS and personalized SMS. Also, we’ll introduce the features of WP SMS for both bulk SMS campaigns and personalized messaging.

What Is Bulk SMS?

As it comes from the name, bulk SMS messaging is about sending a text message to numerous recipients at the same time.

Bulk messaging is often used for sharing updates, promotions, and alerts with a large audience.

Imagine that you write a message to announce an event and send it to all the phone numbers on your contact list. This is a simple bulk SMS.

Of course, for more promotional bulk messaging campaigns, you can use commercial SMS platforms like WP SMS to automate the process. 

Benefits of Bulk SMS for Businesses

Bulk messaging has several advantages like:

1. Wide Reach: You can reach thousands of recipients with one click.
2. Cost-Effective: Bulk SMS campaigns are affordable because you don’t need to spend time, money, and effort to write each message.
3. Simplicity: You just need to create a single text message for all of your recipients.
4. Fast: As you send all the messages simultaneously, you can expect a fast process.

Disadvantages of Bulk SMS Messaging

Despite all the benefits of bulk messaging, it might have some drawbacks like:

• Impersonal: The content of bulk messages is too generic, so people don’t engage with it.
• Risk of Spamming: Bulk messages might seem spammy and dent your brand’s reputation.
• Higher Opt-Out Rates: If you send too many bulk messages with irrelevant content, you can annoy recipients. As a result, many of them might unsubscribe from future campaigns.
• Regulatory Compliance Challenges: If you send your bulk messages without consent or don’t offer an opt-out method, you might face legal fines due to violating regulations like GDPR or TCPA.

What Is Personalized SMS?

In personalized messaging, you’ll target specific audiences and send them customized text messages according to their details like:

• First name
• Last name
• Preferences
• Previous interactions
• Location
• Important dates like birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

Advantages of Personalized SMS

Personalization has many benefits in SMS marketing. Here are some of them:

1. Higher Engagement: Recipients feel relevant to these messages and are more likely to read and respond to them.
2. Builds Trust: When you talk to your audience at a personal level, they believe that you’ve written the message specifically for them, and this increases their trust.
3. Targeted Offers: When you include the personal information of your customers, you can offer products according to their preferences and this will increase the conversion rate.

Drawbacks of Personalized SMS

Although personalization has lots of benefits, you need to consider some drawbacks like:

• Higher Costs: If you want to run personalized messages on a large scale, you need to purchase advanced tools that are considerably expensive.
• Time-Consuming: Analyzing your customer data and creating customized SMS templates will take more time than a bulk SMS campaign.
• Data Dependency: You need an accurate and large database of customers’ information to be able to implement a successful personalized SMS campaign.
• Privacy Concerns: If you use your customers’ data without their consent, you might face legal fines.

Key Differences Between Bulk SMS and Personalized SMS

We defined bulk and personalized SMS messaging but it’s good to compare them in more depth. 

The following table summarizes the key differences between bulk SMS vs personalized SMS:

Bulk SMS vs. Personalized SMS: Which is Better for Your Business?

Now that you know the key differences between bulk and personalized messaging, it’s time to see when to use them in your business.

Overall, bulk SMS is more suitable for generic, mass distribution, and personalized messaging is ideal for building relationships.

For more specific choices, you can consider the following table, as it compares the use cases of bulk & personalized SMS messaging.

In sum, bulk SMS works best when:

• Speed and Scale Matter
• Content Is General
• Budget Is Limited

Also, personalized SMS is ideal for:

• Customer Retention
• Driving Conversions
• Engagement-Focused Campaigns

Bulk vs. Personalized SMS Samples

Let’s compare bulk and personalized SMS campaigns using some real SMS samples:

1. Promotional Campaigns

In a bulk messaging campaign, you can send the following message to all customers with the same generic offer:

On the other hand, if you personalize your campaign, you have to send the sample SMS below:

As you see, in a personalized SMS, you have to customize the message according to the details of the recipient.

2. Reminder

Imagine if you want to remind people of your event. You can use bulk messaging like:

If you want to use SMS as a reminder in more specific situations like appointment reminders, you have to go for personalized messaging.

Here is an example:

You can’t use a bulk messaging strategy for such situations because each recipient has his/her own details.

3. Loyalty Program Notification

You can use both bulk and personalized SMS messages for loyalty programs. Here is an example of a bulk SMS for loyalty programs:

Of course, you can create a more relevant and intimate sense using a personalized SMS like the one below:

When you mention the previous points of the recipient, you can expect a higher engagement rate.

4. Service Alert or Update

When you want to announce a change, update, or emergency, you can use a bulk SMS because it’s similar for all customers. 

Here is an example:

Sometimes, you need to inform a specific customer of an important situation. So you have to go for a personalized SMS like:

Can We Run A Personalized Bulk SMS Marketing?

Until now, we’ve discussed two separate SMS marketing strategies: bulk SMS vs. personalized SMS messaging.

But we want to talk about the personalized bulk messaging strategy that has the best of both worlds.

Personalized bulk SMS marketing offers the scale and efficiency of bulk messaging and the engagement and relevance of personalization.

The question is how to run a personalized bulk messaging campaign.

Steps to Run A Personalized Bulk SMS Campaign

Here’s how personalized bulk SMS works:

1. Define your goals: First, define SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals to know what you want to achieve.

2. Build a laser-targeted subscriber list: Try to run opt-in campaigns to get consent from relevant audiences to send personalized SMS. Try to let them know why you want to use their phone numbers and other data to avoid non-compliance.

3. Segmentation: Divide your audience into smaller groups. Consider important factors like demographics, preferences, or behavior.

4. Dynamic content: Use a versatile SMS tool that offers placeholders in your message templates. This way, you can include personalized details such as the recipient’s name, past interactions, or preferences.

5. Automation: Define triggers to automate your transactional messages, schedule promotional campaigns, and send them at the best time.

6. Tracking & Optimization: Monitor important metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. This way, you can measure if you’ve reached your goals. Then, try to optimize your strategies to increase the ROI of your personalized bulk SMS campaigns.

Looking for A Solution to Personalize Your Bulk SMS Campaign?

Last but not least, let’s get familiar with a great tool that helps you run successful, personalized bulk SMS campaigns.

WP SMS is one of the best SMS platforms that offers lots of features for bulk messaging and personalization.

It’s specifically designed for WordPress websites and lets you integrate your bulk SMS campaigns with other digital marketing strategies.

WP SMS supports more than 300 SMS gateways and lots of add-ons and integrations like WooCommerce notifications, GravityForm, Booking, FluentCRM, etc. 

The good news is that you can use its free plan for basic needs. It also offers many premium features at an affordable price compared to competitors.

So why wait? Try the demo of WP SMS to get familiar with this SMS plugin and contact us if you need more information.

Conclusion

Both bulk and personalized SMS campaigns have their benefits and drawbacks. Bulk SMS is simple, fast, and affordable, but it’s not good in terms of engagement rates. On the other hand, personalized messaging has a high engagement rate. However, it has its difficulties and might be expensive, especially for startups. So, the best course of action is to take advantage of both to optimize your campaigns. Using a tool like WP SMS, you can personalize your bulk messaging campaigns and reach out to countless international customers. You can easily customize your messages using the dynamic content feature of WP SMS and include specific details of each recipient without manual intervention. 

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