We Asked AI To Write Our SMS Marketing Messages — Here’s What Happened

Artificially generated art, voice bots at drive-throughs, chatbots for customer service — 2023 is the year of artificial intelligence. Most recently, ChatGPT is one of these AI bots that are taking the internet by storm. Launched by OpenAI, ChatGPT can do just about everything, from coding to marketing to creative writing.

While leveraging AI capabilities sounds like a silver bullet in theory, can you really trust a robot to do your work for you? Well, it depends — but the results might surprise you, especially when it comes to AI text message marketing. 

Here’s what happened when we asked ChatGPT to write some text marketing examples — and whether or not you should start using SMS AI in your marketing strategy.

What Is ChatGPT?

First, for the unfamiliar, a bit more background on what exactly ChatGPT is.

By referencing large databases, ChatGPT is able to write anything from full-length essays to 140-character social media posts — it can even complete more complex actions, like debugging code and explaining mathematical theorems. All you have to do is input a short prompt, then sit back and watch it work. 

According to the ChatGPT website, the model has been trained to interact with users in a conversational way. It can answer follow-up questions, learn from mistakes, correct information, and reject inappropriate prompts. The same team behind ChatGPT also created InstructGPT, a similar AI tool. The models use something called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to increase safety, helpfulness, and accuracy. It also has human trainers helping to optimize performance.

Lately, ChatGPT has gone viral for writing ads, dating profiles, and even academic material, albeit with varying results for each. We thought it was only right to see how AI would handle text marketing, too. 

ChatGPT Text Message Marketing and SMS AI

• Monthly Specials

Need to make monthly announcements with your mass texts? ChatGPT helped us write a few options for monthly updates for an ice cream shop, including a list of the latest flavors. We even asked it to include a special offer in the message, which it integrated seamlessly into the copy. We were especially impressed with the way the SMS AI broke out the flavor options while still varying the sentences themselves.

In tandem with SlickText, you can also make the message MMS and include photos of your products to further entice customers. You can even create a unique promo code or POS-enabled barcode that can be easily inserted into the pre-written message, which we often recommend doing to provide added value to your subscribers.

• Customer Feedback Collection

Collecting customer feedback is crucial to improving your business. Not only can you find areas of improvement, but you can also use it to better understand what keeps customers coming back for more. The AI texts we generated incorporated our business name, a link to a survey, and information on an incentive. The chatbot even added some extra copy thanking customers and explaining the purpose behind the survey.

By combining something like ChatGPT and SlickText, you can automate survey requests to go out after a customer makes a purchase. Depending on the feedback you receive, you can then direct customers to an official review site or connect them with a customer service representative.

• Flash Sale

Flash sales are so time-sensitive that having copy ready to send at a moment’s notice is a major advantage. We ask ChatGPT to write up a few messages on an upcoming flash sale, with dates, times, and locations included. The SMS AI options are different enough that every one of these texts could be used for separate flash sale events.

With SlickText, you can schedule these messages to be sent out at pre-determined times, or send a text blast the day before manually. Either way, we recommend giving customers shorter notice in order to create a sense of urgency.

• Events & Scheduling

Broadcast text messages are great for alerting people to events or notifying them of schedule changes, so we wanted to test how ChatGPT would compose these messages. Compared to the other texts, these are a little vanilla, but a good starting place. Add a little more personalization, and you’re set to send these AI texts off with a human touch for your own internal communication.

If you use SlickText as your text marketing service, you can handle any incoming messages easily. Our inboxing features let you respond privately to one-on-one messages right from your dashboard, so you can field questions or requests with ease.

• Data Collection

More customer information means more opportunities for targeting. We asked ChatGPT to write conversational marketing texts for collecting customer emails after they’ve opted into a text list, with a special discount code for responding. The offer we included is for joining the list, but if you want to really push for email submissions instead, you can respond with the code after they’ve submitted a valid response — or even integrate your SMS AI and email marketing, and send the code to the email address they provide!

With the data you’ve collected, you can then use SlickText to personalize your messages further, using merge tags to automatically populate subscriber information like names, locations, favorite products, and more.

Using SMS AI in Your Text Marketing

While there are still some bumps that need to be ironed out, the capabilities of AI — and specifically ChatGPT — are pretty impressive. We wouldn’t recommend it for long-form writing, but for shorter promotional messages, it’s a great place to get started. Whether you need copy for business announcements, shipping reminders, special sales, or anything in between, an AI program like ChatGPT can be a valuable tool in your marketing strategy.

At the end of the day, robots still can’t fully mimic the nuances of a human voice (yet), so be sure to put your own touch on the messages. One easy way to add a human voice to AI-written texts is by taking advantage of the personalization and customization tools offered by SlickText, like merge tags and MMS.

Start Sending ChatGPT Texts with SlickText

Ready to start sending mass text messages to your customers? Get started with a free trial, and get in touch with our team if you have any questions or want more information.