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How can you use SMS and text messages in a B2B campaign?

07 Dec How can you use SMS and text messages in a B2B campaign?

Posted at 15:37h in Marketing, Messaging by

Many B2B marketers are realising the potential of text marketing for communicating with customers, building relationships with decision makers, and communicating information that helps support buying decisions.

We explore how the appetite for SMS marketing, once considered the realm of B2C, is now growing in the world of B2B.

Increasing B2B engagement using SMS messages in marketing outreach

Although engaging with B2B decision makers has become increasingly more difficult in the past decade, more recent events have led to the longer term need for B2B marketers to rethink, reinvest and reinvent the way we approach our target markets.

Integrating the use of SMS into your B2B demand generation campaigns can make a significant improvement on engagement and results. Text messages have an average open rate of 98% compared to 20% of emails, and they typically have a 10-15% higher click-through rate, making text marketing highly successful at bringing paying customers to the sales funnel.

Today, our phones rarely leave our sides, texts have an impressively fast open time, with an estimated 90% of text messages read within three minutes of being received. People who receive texts tend to read them quickly, enabling real-time B2B communications and two-way interactions where required, thus improving the overall experience.

It is proven that people are more open to engaging with marketing messages when they are received via text, and 4.5x more likely to reply to a text than an email.

In B2C marketing when it comes to communicating special offers, text messages provide a chance for customers to see and act quickly. In fact, statistics show that more than 60% of people worldwide think that businesses should use SMS more often to communicate valuable information, updates or offers. 

Texting as a format feels more personal than email, providing a feel of exclusivity, and can therefore improve interactions and help them to build a positive relationship with your brand.

Four simple ways for B2B marketers to integrate text marketing

  • Lead generation – Add a short sign-up form on your website giving you the data you need to use SMS marketing to reach key decision makers
  • Order management – Use text messaging to send updates on the status of events or meetings enabling contacts  to reach out more easily with queries or concerns
  • Appointment scheduling – encourage your team to use text to close down and schedule appointments
  • Reminders and follow-ups – Communicate reminders and follow-ups easily with the flexibility of text messaging, bringing benefits for both your business and the customer

 

Incorporated in the right way to your B2B demand generation campaigns, B2B SMS marketing can be a powerful way to engage and close down meetings. It is estimated that marketers using three or more channels in their campaigns see a 250% higher purchase rate than marketers using a single channel, and text can be an effective way to reach buyers in a way that encourages a swifter response.

The model needs to be tailored to your specific brand and audience, and not every feature will be relevant, but with the potential for personalisation and higher open rates, B2B text messaging is worth some serious consideration.

At Incognate we have started to incorporate text into our outreach programmes to increase engagement and results.

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