You can easily balance multiple accounts while providing a highly personalised customer experience with B2B SMS messaging. Compared to email open rates of 20%, SMS text message open rates can reach 98%.
SMS text message marketing prioritises the convenience of the customer by directly reaching them without interfering. Customers are more likely to engage with your marketing messages and become paying clients as a result.
B2B SMS Marketing: What Is It?
B2B SMS is a type of direct marketing that enables companies to text message both current and potential clients. B2B text messaging can be used by businesses to advertise specials, present incentives, and offer customer service.
This form of advertising dates back to the early days of text messaging, when companies began to use this brand-new channel of communication to connect with prospective clients.
Since SMS marketing offers a quick and efficient way to reach a large audience with a personalised message, it has since become a crucial component of many businesses marketing strategies.
Because SMS is an immediate medium and nearly everyone has a mobile phone these days, using it for marketing communications in a B2B environment can be very successful.
Is B2B SMS Marketing Effective?
Mass texting B2B is used by a relatively small number of businesses, but it can enhance your marketing efforts and serve as a supplement to other points of contact with business clients.
Why do text messages for business marketing work? People who make decisions are still present, even when we are discussing a business-to-business relationship.
In light of this, SMS marketing strategies will be appealing to business representatives; however, the strategy should drastically differ from that of B2C communications.
B2B, on the other hand, necessitates more customization, effort, and focus from your business. Lead generation is the main goal of phone marketing for businesses. You must put forth more effort to nurture your leads the more expensive your product or service is.
The same is true for SMS campaigns: even if you send several SMS messages to a business client in the most effective manner, you won’t be able to sell them anything.
Avoiding commercial messages that you would prefer for B2C, sharing pertinent and helpful business content (articles, videos, invitations to webinars), and implementing nurture techniques you would use through other channels are the keys to success in this situation.
Examples of B2B SMS Marketing
- Lead Generation
Finding new customers is just as important for sustainable growth as maintaining your current client relationships. To avoid wasting time and resources, you must be strategic when looking for new leads.
The “golden window” for responding to a lead, according to many experts, is only five minutes long. If a customer must wait more than that before receiving a response from your company, they will probably consider other options.
Making a sign-up form for your SMS marketing list and placing it on your website is a great way to connect with leads. Your leads won’t have to wait for text messages once you’ve established an audience because you can schedule texts or set up auto-replies.
- Appointment Scheduling
By automating your appointment schedule, your team will have more time to work on other important projects, like collaborating with clients. Instead of manually setting up appointments, SMS marketing uses peer-to-peer campaigns that let your company speak with potential customers and arrange personal meetings.
Although SMS appointment scheduling is an automated process, we advise writing your messages as though you were conversing with the recipient. To keep customers interested in your messages, use a friendly tone. Customers prefer speaking to human operators over automated systems.
- Follow-Ups
You can automate follow-up messages whenever you’d like, much like you can with reminders. You can keep your brand in the minds of leads and current customers by following up with them.
Drip campaigns are a popular method for keeping in touch with subscribers. Multiple time-based texts scheduled over a predetermined time frame make up a drip campaign. For instance, you could plan a series of three texts that are sent out over a month or schedule a daily text that is sent out for two weeks.
- Content Exchange
It’s simple to attract subscribers to your SMS marketing list, but they’ll only stay if you give them a reason to. Sending valuable content that is only available to SMS subscribers, such as a guide to using multi-factor authentication, will encourage your subscribers to visit your website rather than wait for them to do so.
Pro tip: Use your sign-up form to segment your SMS subscriber list based on interests. By using this technique, you can make sure that your messages reach interested recipients and are read rather than being filed away in their unread folders.
- Announcements
B2B text messaging can be used to send messages to a specific audience segment or text blasts announcing upcoming product releases. Additionally, SMS marketing platforms can send out large numbers of messages every day, giving you peace of mind that your subscribers will receive the marketing messages you intend them to.
The Advantages of B2B Texting
What benefits do B2B SMS messaging have that can demonstrate their value, then?
- High Engagement
SMS generates more engagement from recipients than email because of its nature. It has a lot to do with the fact that mobile users open almost all SMS in the shortest amount of time, that they are brief and contain concentrated data, and that they don’t require a lot of customer interaction.
As you can see, SMS can reach your lead even if you are unable to get in touch with them via email or other commonly used “professional” and “business-oriented” channels. And when combined with a compelling call to action that is well-targeted, you will be able to get a response and get in touch with your prospect.
- Outstanding Possibilities for Personalization
In B2B sales, personalization is crucial, and SMS can give you many opportunities to incorporate it into your campaigns. For instance, SMS can be used to effectively and quickly deliver particular content pieces to a client’s decision-maker.
If you have researched your customer’s business and gathered sufficient data, you can use the high speed and open rate of SMS to reach out to B2B clients with messages and appeals to you that are specifically tailored for them.
- Cost-efficiency
When compared to other marketing channels, SMS is a more affordable option. You need to set aside money for SMS marketing software and an SMS testing service that will help you gather comprehensive SMS delivery analytics and ensure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
For SMS-specific content creation or any other costs, you won’t need a large budget. Additionally, if you use both email and SMS, many email providers charge low prices for their bulk SMS services.
Starting Your B2B SMS Marketing Campaign
For companies that want to engage their customers in conversation, Guni offers a communication platform. You can build superior customer experiences that encourage engagement and convert leads using our omnichannel marketing software Mobile Marketing Cloud or our quick and dependable SMS Gateway API.