We’re in the thick of Love Island season, which—if you don’t watch—generally means Brits in bikinis crowing “I got a text!”
Consumers, too, might have noticed an influx of messages on their mobiles. According to Attentive CEO Amit Jhawar, brands are increasingly on the other end of the line, and they could have a lot to gain from it.
Jhawar recently spoke to Tech Brew about how the digital marketing platform helps retailers integrate SMS—or short message service—communications into their campaigns and how it’s leveraging artificial intelligence to deliver a highly tailored shopping experience.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
For starters, can you tell us a little bit about what Attentive does and where it fits into the communications landscape?
Attentive is a mobile marketing platform that focuses on personalizing messages between brands and their consumers. And ultimately…we want to deliver bespoke shopping experiences. If you think about going to a website today, [we] can all go to the same website. And we’ll get the exact same experience regardless of what we’re each interested in.
As more shoppers move to mobile—and you want to reach shoppers where they’re spending their time on their mobile devices—you’re seeing a lot more behavior where these consumers are distracted. And hitting these consumers with SMS messages that have the right content for the categories that they’re most interested in, the brands they care about, results in a much better experience, both for the consumer and the brand.
Can you give some examples of brands that are doing this?
Customers like Reebok, Tecovas, the Milwaukee Bucks, Boston Proper, all these brands are the brands that use Attentive, and then people like Crate & Barrel, Michaels, Chico’s, are all using different versions of the technology.
We’ve highlighted Neiman Marcus as one of the great examples of using our AI product where we write the messages based on each individual on behalf of the brand, [and] send them out. So that that consumer can figure out what’s in their style, what’s most interesting to them, and get to a place where each message matters…We can be very efficient in what we send, making every message count.
How is SMS evolving to meet these needs?
There’s been a wave of technological advances here. The first wave was, hey, email’s getting overwhelmed at the consumer level. How do you reach consumers in a different way that is opt-in, meaning that there isn’t a lot of spam?
I sit on the board of the CTIA, which is the governing body for the wireless industry in the United States…There’s a lot of important players who have defined the rules of what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. One of the core tenants for us is to reduce spam on SMS and make it a safe channel forever. Because delivering a lot of scammy messages on SMS is not good for consumers, it’s not good for the carriers, it’s not good for the industry or businesses.
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SMS is an opt-in-only channel, meaning that you have to give specific consent with legalese that says that this consumer knows that they’re gonna get messages. And any time they reply with the word “stop,” they are removed from the list. And if you don’t abide by that, there are very heavy fines that are now enforced on bad actors.
When did we start seeing increased use of this channel for marketing?
We introduced our [two-tap] technology in 2018…Now, all kinds of forward-leaning brands are generally experimenting in some way with SMS or use it as a core part of their marketing communications program.
They know that 99% of messages are read within an hour of being sent. And consumers actually are enrolling for that specific content. If you send them a lot of stuff they don’t want, if you send them too many messages, they can just reply “stop” to get out.
You mentioned that AI is being used to tailor messages to consumers directly. What does this mean for the future of SMS marketing?
When we think about how messaging between a brand and the consumer should work, we see a world where every message becomes more or less bespoke. It’s written for that consumer, based on that consumer’s interests…We’re at a place now where the generative part of GenAI allows you to write messages at the individual consumer level. So you can connect to them specifically.
So it’s based on a person’s recorded history with the brand? We can scrape all these attributes on a consumer: Do they zoom into an item? Did they not? How long did they look at [it]? How many times have they come back? If you zoom in on an item, that shows higher intent and interest…These are all signals for us that we’re starting to process in our models and use that in the generative AI to help deliver that customized experience. And that’s where all this magic happens.
Update 07/12/24: This piece has been updated to note that Tecovas is among the brands Jhawar lists as using Attentive.