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Whether it is to inform and educate your customers, understand customer sentiment, capture customer satisfaction, or increase customer engagement, SMS provides a great way to personalize your communication.

But what can take your SMS outreach and marketing strategy to the next level is SMS localization. SMS localization can have a positive impact on your business’s revenues while helping you form a strong emotional connection with your customers.

Reports state that5 billion people
around the world have the ability to send and receive messages via SMS in 2018.  Clearly, SMS is the best way to reach out to customers across geographies and demographics.

What this also means is that your content should be accessible to people whose preferred language of communication is not English.

That’s not all. In today’s business landscape, engaging with your customers has never been more important – whether it is to guide product development, improve the customer experience, or to build customer loyalty and engagement. And, what better way to do this in a language your customers understand?

Read on to see how you can incorporate SMS localization in your CEM and marketing strategy while positively impacting revenues and driving customer engagement and loyalty.

1. Informing and alerting customers

Since this type of content carries critical information, you need to ensure that it is easy to read for customers. By speaking in their own language, you can ensure that all the relevant information is conveyed to the customer while keeping things quickly actionable.

This ensures a smoother customer experience while building trust. This is especially true in the banking and financial services industry. In the context of logistics and delivery, localizing SMS also helps reduce human costs as well, as not all employees involved in delivery and logistics, understand English. By providing instructions in the local language, companies can lower human resource costs and improve efficiency.

2. Getting to know your customers

SMS can be a powerful tool that your CEM strategy can deploy to get to know your customers. By creating SMS surveys in the local language, you can understand your customers better so you can build better products, drive sales, and grow your business. When you talk to your customers in their preferred language, your customers are more likely to share information with you while forming an emotional connection with your brand.

3. Measuring customer satisfaction

Understanding how your customers feel about the quality of your product or service is the first step in gauging the effectiveness of your product. With roughly 8 times the email response rate, SMS surveys make it to the top of the list as far as capturing customer satisfaction is concerned. 

With questions and answers in the local language, customer responses are more likely to be honest and accurate, resulting in more useful data and insights for your business. Even a simple process like collecting post-sale feedback is more effective when done in the customer’s preferred language. You could, for instance, understand what supplementary or follow-up services your customers would need.

These insights can also help you design products that your customers really need, helping you build better products, and grow your business.

4. Building and driving engagement

As is true for all things marketing, the key to is to send the right message to the relevant audience. Instead of bombarding customers with generic messages in English, think about how you can personalize your SMS messages to make them genuinely interesting and useful by using the local language.

Tailor your marketing efforts by using SMS localization so that each user gets useful and valuable content that’s easy for them to consume and use. Whether it is personalized offers or discount coupons or promotions, marketing initiatives are more likely to convert when your users fully understand and appreciate what is on offer.

Whether it is through educating and informing your customers or building brand loyalty, interacting with users in the local language is sure to build higher levels of engagement with your target audience.

5. Customer service

Using SMS localization in your customer service is one of the smartest things you can do for your business. Here’s why – 64 percent of customers choose SMS over voice if the choice is presented to them.

SMS connects with your customers directly, making it a private space where customers express their feedback and complaints freely.  By soliciting this information in the local language, you can significantly improve customer relations and consumer experiences.

Conclusion 

As more and more businesses realize the importance of localization, your business needs to remember that a user’s language experience doesn’t start end with a website visit or purchase.

It extends across the buyer’s journey and localization can help bridge communication gaps to ensure a truly seamless experience for your customers. In addition to providing information in a user’s own language, speaking to a customer in their own language is a quick and simple way to make your brand more approachable while building trust and a lasting brand connection.

A technology SMS solution that seamlessly integrates SMS localization into your SMS marketing and Customer Experience Management strategies is just what your modern marketing toolkit needs.