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If you still haven’t discovered the benefits of B2B SMS marketing – you’re missing out. Plenty of B2C companies already use SMS to engage and nurture customers, increase sales, and even transform customer service, but you don’t have to sell directly to consumers to benefit from SMS.
In the B2B world, building strong relationships with your clients is a must, and SMS marketing strategies can deliver incredible results. As a B2B brand, you can use SMS to boost audience engagement and generate new leads for your sales team.
SMS can help you increase average order values, upsell and cross-sell leads, and even retain customers for longer, with personalized fast-paced customer service.
Here we’re going to introduce you to the benefits of B2B texting, and how you can use it to accelerate the growth of your company.
Learn how to create engaging text message campaigns and automate your outreach.
What is B2B SMS Marketing?
B2B SMS marketing is a form of opt-in marketing communication strategy that involves using text messages to engage with business clients or customers. Just like B2C SMS marketing strategies, B2B campaigns can involve various types of messages and promotions.
For instance, you might use your mass text messaging strategy to send offers and promotional deals to customers for specific products and solutions. You could send texts to alert them when you’re launching new offers, or to advertise upcoming events and experiences.
You might even use custom text messages to send personalized “quotes” to customers for services and solutions they’ve requested. Since B2B success hinges heavily on building and maintaining strong relationships with clients, most companies combine promotional texts with other campaigns too.
For instance, you might use transactional texts to keep customers informed with order and service updates or remind them of upcoming appointments and payment deadlines. You could also explore two-way text messaging to use SMS as a customer support tool.
The Benefits of B2B Text Messaging
Ultimately, whether you’re using SMS for B2B marketing purposes, lead nurturing, or customer support, this communication channel gives you a convenient, fast-paced way to stay connected with your clients. SMS gives companies a fantastic way to break through the “digital noise” that busy business buyers have to deal with every day.
Instead of trying to stand out in a client’s email inbox, or capture their attention with a social media post or well-written article, you can reach your leads wherever they are, in an instant.
Plus, you get to bypass the frustrating process of “cold calling” leads. That means you spend less time on lead generation, and your clients get a better experience with your brand overall. Around 90% of business leads say they’d rather be contacted by text than phone call.
The Top Advantages of B2B Texting
Investing in B2B SMS marketing leads to:
- Better engagement: If you compare SMS vs email marketing, you’ll find text messages have much higher open, click-through, and response rates.
- Improved deliverability: SMS messages are less likely to get stuck in spam folders than emails (if you follow the right compliance rules). Additionally, most people read texts within 90 seconds of receiving them, so you’re more likely to connect with your audience.
- Simpler marketing strategies: It takes a lot less work to create a series of texting ads with a platform like Clerk Chat, than a full email or social media campaign. That means you spend less time creating content, and more time nurturing leads.
- Valuable insights: If you’re using cutting-edge text messaging platforms like Clerk Chat, you’ll have access to valuable data about open rates, response rates, and engagement, which you can use to guide your future marketing campaigns.
- Greater personalization: With access to details about all of your leads, you can personalize every message. You can even send customers specific deals and offers based on their previous purchasing history and their unique needs.
- Enhanced customer experience: With B2B text messaging, you can keep customers up to date with new products and services, remind them about upcoming appointments, and even answer any questions they have – improving retention rates.
B2B SMS Marketing Examples: Ways to Use B2B Text Messages
One of the biggest challenges B2B companies have involves actually filling the pipeline with leads for sales teams to follow up with. SMS can help with this. With SMS lead generation software, companies can create landing pages and forms that encourage potential prospects to share their contact details with the company in exchange for something beneficial.
For instance, you might offer customers access to a free webinar, or download if they agree to subscribe to your B2B SMS marketing list. As soon as you have your prospect’s contact details, and they’ve “opted-in” to receiving messages from you, you can begin to guide them through the sales funnel with promotional messages.
Some examples of types of promotional SMS strategies companies might use include:
Product or Service Announcement Texts
Just like B2C companies in industries like retail and ecommerce use SMS marketing to promote new products and services, B2B brands can take the same approach.
B2B text messaging is a great way to let your customers know when you’re introducing a new product, service, or even a pricing tier that they might be interested in. With the right software, you can even personalize these texts to ensure you’re promoting the right options to customers based on their budget, industry, location, or specific needs.
You can even use texts to keep customers informed about new features and updates to your existing products or services. For instance, if you sell email marketing software to SMBs, you can use text to tell them about your new “AI content generation” feature, or something similar. This increases engagement and boosts your chances of additional sales.
Deal or Special Offer Messages
Again, in ecommerce and SMS retail marketing strategies, it’s common to see companies using text to inform their customers of upcoming deals they can take advantage of. B2B companies can use this strategy too. You can use B2B texting to increase conversions at speed by promoting:
- Limited time deals or sales
- Special offers for VIP customers
- Discount codes or gift vouchers
If you’re a B2B company selling subscription-based products and services, you could even use these types of promotional texts to increase your chances of repeat purchases. For instance, you might use a scheduling system to automatically send a message to your customers when their renewal date is approaching, offering them a discount on their next purchase.
Demo Scheduling Texts
For companies that need clients to meet directly with their sales team before a purchase takes place, SMS is a great way to connect with customers and suggest a time to arrange a call or meeting. Some text messaging automation systems, like Clerk Chat, can even integrate with your existing calendar systems, so you can reduce your risk of overlapping appointments.
Learn how to create engaging text message campaigns and automate your outreach.
You can include all kinds of details in demo scheduling texts about the benefits of your products or solution and even add links to website pages. Plus, once you schedule a demo or meeting with a stakeholder, you can send them additional “reminder” texts afterwards.
Reminder texts make it less likely that your sales teams will waste time preparing for meetings and demos where potential customers never actually show up.
Event Promotion Messages
Your B2B SMS marketing texts don’t have to focus exclusively on promoting products and services. They can also promote events that will help you strengthen your relationship with potential clients. For instance, you might promote an upcoming webinar, where you can teach customers about your latest product, and its features.
Or you could invite customers to a workshop or product launch event through SMS. You could even let customers know when members of your team are going to be hosting sessions or roundtable discussions at industry events they might be attending.
Quote Texts
After a discussion with a potential lead where your sales team learns all about their specific requirements, you might need to come up with a personalized “quote” for their product or service. SMS is a great way to deliver that quote, along with any other information a lead might need to make a final purchasing decision.
Since SMS has fantastic deliverability rates, you have a better chance of reaching your customers with a quote via text than you would through email. Plus, you don’t have to waste time trying to catch them on the phone to discuss their quote.
Other Powerful B2B Texting Strategies
In the B2B landscape, text messages don’t have to be directly “promotional” to have an impact on your sales and revenue. Various other B2B text messaging strategies can also help with nurturing leads, increasing sales, and boosting client retention, such as:
Transactional Texts
Transactional SMS messages are valuable to B2B customers. You can use these messages to let your customers know when their order is en route, remind them of a payment deadline, or even help them regain access to an account when they lose their password.
Educational Messages
Nurturing relationships and earning trust is crucial in the B2B space. With text messages, you can send your customers valuable, educational information that makes your company seem more trustworthy and credible. For instance, you might send them links to case studies, whitepapers, webinars, and onboarding materials they can use after they make a purchase.
Notification Texts
Timely notifications about potential service outages, issues with products, or even changes to your pricing strategy are crucial to preserving relationships with your B2B customers. With AI-powered text messaging, you’ll automatically keep buyers informed of anything that might be important to them or their experience with your brand.
Follow-Up Messages
Both before you convert a B2B lead into a customer, and after, following up is essential for keeping them engaged. With a B2B SMS marketing platform, it’s easy to follow up with a lead before they buy something, asking them whether they have any additional questions about your solution, or sharing valuable information. After your customer purchases something, you can follow up with messages asking about their experience, or any concerns they might have.
Customer Service Texting
B2B text messaging is an excellent way to improve your response time to customer support requests in the B2B world. You can allow customers to text you with any queries you might have, and use a platform like Clerk Chat to organize all of those messages into a unified inbox. From there, service representatives can rapidly respond to questions with personalized answers. You can even use AI to automatically answer common queries.
Feedback Request Messages
Finally, B2B texting also gives you a great way to collect feedback from your customers. You can ask your customers what they like and dislike about your products or services, or invite them to fill in a feedback form. You could even ask certain customers to participate in case studies, or share quotes for customer success stories. Alternatively, you could ask for a Google review via text that you can use as social proof when promoting your business online.
B2B SMS Marketing Best Practices and Tips
Now you know the various ways you can use SMS to nurture relationships and increase sales, you’re almost ready to start developing your own strategy. However, before you dive in, there are some best practices you’ll need to keep in mind.
1. Remember SMS Compliance
First, ensure you’re adhering to the compliance guidelines for B2B SMS marketing. To avoid fines and reputational damage, follow CAN SPAM Act text guidelines, like making sure you always ask for permission to contact a customer before sending them any messages.
Familiarize your team with concepts like TCPA guidelines and rules for when and how you can send promotional texts to leads. Additionally, make sure you’re protecting any data shared by your customers, and archiving texts, when necessary, based on your industry guidelines.
2. Make Messages Personal and Professional
B2B text messages should always be clear, straightforward, and professional. Avoid using hyperbolic statements, capital letters and excessive punctuation in your messages, as this will make you appear less trustworthy. Additionally, try not to be overly aggressive, even if you’re trying to “sell” something. Instead, focus on positioning yourself as a valuable source of information and support.
Personalizing your messages is crucial too. Collect details about your customers throughout the SMS Opt-in process, such as information about their location, industry, and budget, so you can segment your leads, and send them more relevant, engaging messages. Use custom fields in your messages to add a person’s name, or a company’s name into the mix, when possible, too.
Finish every message with a clear call to action, such as “schedule a demo”, or “hit reply to learn more”, so your customer knows what to do next.
3. Get the Timing Right
Timing is crucial with B2B SMS marketing for two reasons. First, it’s crucial to ensuring you adhere to compliance guidelines that prohibit companies from sending solicitation messages at inappropriate times. Secondly, it’s the key to ensuring you have the best chances of converting a lead.
Keep the schedule and work day of your target customer in mind, and schedule messages to arrive at the time that’s going to make the most sense for them. For instance, they might be less likely to read your texts during traditional working hours. You might find you get more responses if you send texts on an evening or first thing on a morning during working days.
4. Test and Monitor your Results
Finally, make sure you use the analytical and reporting tools in your B2B SMS marketing platform to your advantage. Experiment with different messaging times, CTA strategies, and campaigns and pay attention to how different methods affect your engagement and conversion rates.
Platforms like Clerk Chat offer extensive access to reporting tools, and allow you to drill down into your results based on specific periods and audience segments, so you can get a clear view of which strategies you should be using to boost your sales, and enhance customer experiences.
The Ultimate B2B SMS Marketing Platform: Clerk Chat
B2B SMS marketing strategies give you a powerful way to increase sales, generate and nurture more leads, and enhance your relationships with your clients. However, if you want to achieve the best results, while minimizing compliance headaches and costs, you need the right platform.
Clerk Chat makes it easy to create powerful B2B text messaging strategies, with SMS templates for everything from transactional messages to promotional campaigns, and customer service methods. With our easy automation solutions, AI-powered tools for enhancing customer service, and extensive reports, you’ll have everything you need to build the perfect B2B SMS strategy.
Plus, our platform integrates with all the tools you already use, from Microsoft Teams for collaboration, to Smarsh and Global Relay for compliant archiving.
Start your B2B SMS marketing journey with Clerk Chat today.
