How to use an AI text message generator for SMS marketing

It’s tough to keep up with your text messaging campaigns when you’re a small marketing team (or a team of one). Crafting the perfect text message sounds easy in theory, but in practice, you’re also handling your SEO, your email marketing, social media, and whatever other tasks you need to keep a business moving.

You’ve probably heard a lot about using generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) to help reduce your workload. The right AI tools can help you brainstorm new ideas and engage with your customers while saving you time. You just have to know how to use it. While you can use tools like ChatGPT to generate SMS messages for your business, you can also use custom AI-powered solutions that are built to do that specific job.

In this blog post, I’ll explain how to use AI text message generators to make your job easier while staying true to your creativity. Plus, you’ll learn about a new AI SMS tool you can try for free.

Two ways to use AI and text messaging

While there are many ways to use AI-powered SMS marketing, most people stick to the most well-known two options: brainstorming and chatbots. The first helps you come up with and refine the messages you’ll send to contacts. That’s where AI text message generators come in. The second use is more technical, it involves powering the entire conversation with artificial intelligence.

1. Use an AI assistant for text messaging ideas

AI assistants can write examples of texts for you or provide ideas of what to write about, depending on what prompts you give them. They do some of the “thinking” for you to give you more ideas to work with and save you time. The prompts you give the AI impact the results you get back. So, at the very lest, be sure to describe your business, your customers, and what you want your text messages to accomplish when you write the prompt.

Free and low-cost generative AI tools like ChatGPT are popular picks for this tactic. But, if you have a text messaging service with a built-in AI solution, you can skip a few extra steps. SimpleTexting and its AI Assist feature is one example.

Using an AI assistant in SMS marketing goes beyond simply asking it to write the text for you. You can also:

• Come up with new angles on an existing text campaign
• Find benefits or customer pain points to emphasize in your texts
• Think of selling tactics to use in your messages (such as fear of missing out)
• Generate multiple messages and combine their best elements
• Change your text’s tone for your target audience or campaign

Marketing consultant Nora Sudduth shared her process for creating SMS campaigns with generative AI for a business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. Before diving into the steps, she shared an important takeaway:

“AI is great for quickly brainstorming lots of different ideas around messaging and angles. Then you need to use your industry knowledge and expertise to pick and choose and refine.”

Nora Sudduth, Marketing Consultant

She took these actions to build a campaign for her client:

1. Start with a strategy: Nora and her client established the goals for the campaign, as well as details about the audience, tone, and offering.
2. Bring AI into the mix: Then, she input what she learned from the strategy session into a generative AI tool. “AI offered a variety of messaging options around time savings, ease of integration, increased productivity, and exclusive early-bird access,” Nora says.
3. Choose and adjust: After choosing the most effective options from the AI, Nora adjusted the AI output and rewrote texts to suit the client’s audience. Using data from customer surveys, she tailored each text to resonate with the audience’s needs.
4. Test (and test again): With the texts ready to go, Nora A/B tested different calls to action and customer pain points. Nora says, “Based on our conversion data, we continued to refine those messages until we hit numbers we were happy with.”

The results were texts like this one:

2. Develop an AI-powered SMS chatbot

AI can also automate simple one-to-one customer interactions. Building an AI-powered SMS chatbot is more complex than brainstorming with AI, but it offers a way for you to help your customers when you aren’t available. So, the extra work definitely pays off.

You can create an SMS chatbot without generative AI, such as how you can use Zapier to create a basic chatbot in SimpleTexting. This type of chatbot is built to recognize different questions or requests and then reply to people with a pre-defined answer. When building an SMS chatbot, you’d map out “conversational paths” that include auto-generated responses like this:

Chatbots built with generative AI can improve this process with more flexibility and personalization. That’s because they’re able to generate unique responses based on a “knowledge base” from which they are trained. The chatbot’s knowledge base could be anything from your support documentation to product manuals to your menu and hours of operation. If you’re worried that customers will be turned off by the experience, don’t be – 80% of customers told Sinch they’re open to using AI chatbots.

Already using Zapier? You can try out new features that allow you to create custom, AI-powered chatbots built on OpenAI’s technology. Train the AI on a specific knowledge source and connect it with SimpleTexting to start generating replies to texts from customers and contacts.

Be aware that genAI chatbots do have risks. As Sinch points out, generative AI sometimes provides incorrect information or “hallucinations,” completely nonsensical statements.

Meet SimpleTexting’s AI assistant for text messaging

Not every small business is ready to start building chatbots powered by generative AI. It’s new technology and even the biggest brands in the world are still figuring things out. AI text message generators, however, are an easy way to start taking advantage of generative artificial intelligence. For example, SimpleTexting’s AI Assist is an easy-to-use tool for text message generation and refinement.

AI Assist is built into every SimpleTexting plan – even the free trial – so you can use it whenever you need to write or improve a campaign text.

Using AI Assist’s text message generator

When you’re building a campaign and you need ideas that get your message across, SimpleTextings AI text message generator is there to help you brainstorm without ever leaving our platform.

Click Generate message under AI Assist when composing a campaign. A dialogue box will pop up where you enter a prompt describing the kind of text message you need for the campaign. Click Generate a message inside the window and SimpleTexting’s AI Assist will generate five options for you to review and choose from. Not quite what you need? Click Refresh suggestions for a new set of options, or try rewriting your prompt for different results.

Once AI Assist generates a text message you like, just click Select message and it will be added to the campaign building workflow. Of course, you can still change the text to meet your needs. For example, maybe you’d rather use an emoji at the end of your message than the hashtag the AI tool suggested.

Speaking of emojis in SMS campaigns… AI Assist can help you with that too! There are a lot of ways to use our AI text message generator as a creative partner in your customer communications and marketing. Here’s how a tax advisor might use our tool to keep in touch with clients during the holidays:

Using AI Assist to refine and rephrase your text messages

One of the most useful ways to take advantage of SimpleTexting is one-to-one communications and SMS conversations with your contacts. Our users do this directly from the Inbox where they can text back and forth with customers and clients without using their mobile device.

But finding the right words and striking the right tone isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve added AI Assist to the Inbox as well. You can use the AI Assist Rephraser Tool to refine your message. Just click the lightbulb icon after you compose a text. Then, you can choose from one of four tone adjusters:

• Short and sweet: Get the same message across with fewer words. This option can come in handy when you’d like to save message credits on longer messages.
• Expand: Ask the AI to elaborate on what you’ve already written to get more detailed with your message.
• Friendly: A user favorite – add a friendlier tone to your message to connect better with your customers.
• Formal: When it’s time to get down to business, you can choose this option to make your message sound more formal.

Get creative with AI and text messaging campaigns

AI can go even further than brainstorming, writing, and chatbots. Check out how these businesses use AI text messaging to create unique campaigns.

1. Blue Barn’s custom pet poems

When Blue Barn asked for our help on the Shoestring podcast, we were happy to oblige with plenty of text message marketing ideas. One of these suggestions combined AI’s image analysis and generative writing abilities.

Our campaign idea involved asking customers to text a cute photo of their pets to receive a text back with a custom poem. ChatGPT would analyze the pet in the photo and their surroundings, then reply with a fun poem based on that analysis. Here are a couple of examples:

Blue Barn used this creative AI-driven marketing strategy to accomplish two things:

1. It helped them encourage existing customers to opt in to their SMS marketing list.
2. It provided basic customer data for personalization because it indicated what type of pet the contact owns.

2. Window Factory’s personalized quotes

Home services businesses involve a lot of custom quotes, which can add time to the texting process. Window manufacturer and installer Window Factory saved time and increased quote requests by 25% by crafting personalized quotes with AI. General manager Nick Marshall and the Window Factory team used an AI tool to generate custom quote texts like this one:

3. Helix Sleep’s sleep quiz responses

AI can integrate texts into interactive processes like quizzes to create a full experience for customers. Helix Sleep, a mattress company, increased its conversion rate by 18% by sending AI-generated mattress suggestions to customers who took a sleep quiz. Here’s an example of one of those texts:

4. MagicProCleaning’s timeframe-based reminders

Services that should happen at regular intervals, such as healthcare, maintenance, or cleaning, can bring customers back through reminders, but the tone of those reminders is key. MagicProCleaning, a cleaning service provider, used tone suggestions from AI based on customer data to strike the right balance between urgency and value and saw a 20% increase in bookings within a week. Let’s look at an example text:

Try an AI text message generator for yourself

If you’re already using SimpleTexting, be sure to give our new AI Assist tool a try. And if you’re not taking advantage of our platform yet… AI SMS marketing is just a few clicks away!

Sign up for a free 14-day SimpleTexting trial to give all of our features a spin, including our AI Assist. And if you like what you see, we’ll offer flexible credit-based plans and guide you through the number registration process.