Did someone suggest you run a B2B text marketing campaign? The first question you would ask is – is SMS marketing suitable for B2B marketing?

B2B works through a different model than B2C. While the B2C model focuses on selling products directly to consumers, B2B is a business model in which companies are doing business between themselves. Essentially, B2B companies sell products or services to other companies.

While many B2B companies turn down the idea of text marketing for their customer, B2B text messaging is an effective way to communicate with business clientele, enabling brands to build relationships with decision-makers and offer information that helps them to make buying decisions.

Do you know that SMS text messages offer open rates as high as 98%, while the open rates of emails are only 20%?

With B2B text marketing, brands can create a highly personalized customer experience while balancing multiple accounts easily. SMS and text messages reach people directly without any other intervention. Text marketing makes consumers more open to engaging with marketing messages and is more likely to bring paying customers to the sales funnel.

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Why SMS marketing is growing?

As we stated earlier, SMS marketing is a convenient and viable form of direct marketing for B2B brands. As consumer behavior keeps evolving and today mobile devices have become more personal than ever, instant messages are a key to enticing more customers. CMOs and senior marketers are investing heavily in text marketing to engage potential customers and drive their digital customer experience strategy.

It is true that consumers prefer texting and are more likely to respond to texts from brands, brands should also pay attention to the following practices while sending text messages.

Respect consumer privacy

A text marketing expert once suggested that buying a bunch of mobile phone numbers and forwarding blanket texts to everyone will do more harm than good. They will yield as ineffective results as a failed email marketing campaign. While there is no dearth of consumer data, marketers must always respect consumer privacy otherwise it could negatively impact your brand’s reputation.

Get permissions first

While you have a list of consumers who opted to be in your SMS list earlier, the same people will be irksome if you send them messages constantly. Thus, marketers should take permission before shooting marketing messages. Always give your prospects the option to opt out so that they know they can limit the messages from reaching out to their inbox.

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Never spamming consumers

Text messages are powerful because it is a direct form of communication. Even though it takes your brand right to your consumers, you must never spam them with unwanted texts. Limit your text messages and the frequency should be no more than two to six per month.

Now you know the factors to refrain from while launching your text marketing campaign, let us see some B2B SMS marketing examples to take a cue from:

1. Lead Generation

Major brands use text marketing for strong lead generation. While nurturing your existing clients is essential, so is finding new customers. Nevertheless, you need to be strategic about looking for new leads so that no time and resources are wasted.

Do you need a great way to connect to your leads? It is by adding a short sign-up form on your website. Once the visitors fill out the form and opt for your SMS list, you have the data to schedule the text messages.

2. Order management

You need to stay on the top of the orders and it is an integral part of your business operations. Brands use text messages to let their customers know the status of their orders and enables the consumers to reach out to the brand in case of any queries or concerns.

3. Appointment Scheduling

Automated appointment scheduling is nothing new and this helps the team to focus on high-level tasks such as collaborating with your clients. Brands use SMS marketing to use peer-to-peer campaigns enabling your business to have conversations with leads and schedule appointments easily.

4. Reminders and Follow-ups

Brands use text marketing for reminders and follow-up messages with the consumers whenever they like. In the case of B2B, follow-ups are crucial because a brand is dealing with another brand that is equally occupied with daily tasks. So a drip campaign for follow-ups will do.

Final word

If B2B marketers want to make the best use of text marketing, they need to tweak it a bit to fit into their marketing ecosystem. SMS marketing in the B2B world need to be more professional in terms of the language used, what you offer and how it is communicated.

The customers should get the feel of exclusivity by reading your text messages.

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