Yesterday 21st of May, 2020, the world celebrated World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development which saw a flood of discussions and thoughts on social media. It got us thinking about the individualism of man from man and uniqueness of each culture and dialect which is, at times, so neglected in modern business.
Moderation and technology made communication easy and doing business even easier. While today, people communicate with each other nationally or globally using simple tools like emails, social media, and SMS, we easily forget that these people we interact with daily come from different works of life, cultures, traditions, and even upbringing. How we behave or act towards others have various impacts or meanings.
So we took a moment to research culture-business relationships and how cultural awareness affects your business or SMS marketing as a marketer. Here are what we found:
Cultural awareness enhances SMS communication
This shouldn’t sound completely unheard but let’s break it down a bit. Depending on the type of business you run and tribe or culture of your recipients, falling back on cultural diversity can greatly improve how you communicate with recipients and how they respond.
It is a bit difficult, almost impossible to determine the culture or tribe of your recipients but if you use an SMS provider built to track recipients by countries, it offers a strong lead. Furthermore, you can ask recipients to state their cultures or tribe or nationality during opt-ins or at any data updates processes then use the information to improve cultural communication.
The real question might be, “how do I use cultural information to communicate?” It’s quite simple! If you have recipients scattered in different countries across the globe, celebrate significant national holidays or seasons with them. This brings your business closer to your recipients, breeds loyalty, and possibly increase conversions. If you operate on a national scale, simply sending out messages to recipients once in a while in their local dialect or celebrating traditional events particular to their cultures can do the same trick.
Cultural awareness helps you avoid sending unpleasant messages
What seems normal to Mr. A might be awkward to Mr. B. For example, many cultures around the world value meat as a major source of food and even mark events for this purpose, whereas there are a number of cultures that respect animal flesh. Imagine you never knew 30% of your subscribers are no-meat voters (no fault of yours) and you decided to send a ‘meat day’ greeting SMS to your subscribers. Oops!
Little errors like this like result in massive opt-outs from your campaign. Again, there is no shame in that. It is difficult to determine people’s cultural beliefs unless you ask. Even at that, it can be difficult to segment subscribers based on these beliefs. But it always pays to know just a bit more about the culture of each recipient.
Cultural awareness improves overal SMS marketing design and reach
Many marketers jump right into SMS marketing campaign without a thorough evaluation of what they aim to achieve with the campaign. It might be to increase profits, brand awareness, or sales revenue. Whatever the aim might be, an initial awareness of cultural differences within target markets or audiences can greatly influence the SMS marketing design from the onset and help you reach your goals quicker.
Take into account that people are more likely to relate with products or services that interact with them in the norm, dialect, and culture forms they connect to. You can get creative with cultural awareness while campaigning for people to join your SMS plan. If they can connect with your SMS offerings from cultural perspectives, they are likely to signup. Remember, the more recipients in your phonebook, the better your chances of sales.
What Next?
Reflecting on and researching cultural differences really gave us an experience of a lifetime. Not only would this trivia, but important, people-skill greatly shape how prospects and customers view your business, it might expand your understanding of human behaviors and buying-decision-making-processes. People are indeed unique in languages, cultures, and traditions, all of which make life truly remarkable.