B2B SMS Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide to B2B Text Messaging

Companies that serve other businesses aren’t necessarily selling their goods to eager consumers. Instead, their target audiences are made up of other entities or organizations that need to move their own products and services down the chain.

The mission in business-to-business (or B2B) marketing is to help your audience solve problems while also improving their revenue and efficiency. Achieving success requires a unique approach to building and maintaining critical relationships between you and your B2B audience.

Today, relying on basic communication platforms doesn’t always cut it. It’s easy for your B2B message to get lost in the chaos of other calls, emails, direct messages, and paperwork—and that’s where B2B SMS text message marketing comes in.

B2B SMS messaging enables fast connections with other businesses and helps your messages stand out.  With an open rate of 99% and a click-through rate that’s 13x higher than email, it’s hard to find another channel that connects and converts as effectively as SMS.

What Is B2B SMS Marketing?

B2B SMS marketing, also known as text message marketing, is an incredibly effective way for businesses to send targeted, personalized communication directly to your target audience.

Just like individuals use SMS to interact with friends and family, businesses can use B2B SMS marketing to communicate and connect with their customers, suppliers, and partners. It’s a more personal, direct way to communicate with everyone in your B2B ecosystem. These messages are sent through an aggregator and delivered by a mobile carrier.

How Do Marketers Use B2B Texting?

There are many types of use cases to consider for your own B2B SMS marketing efforts. The best approaches for you depend on your goals, your clients, and their audience. Here is a deeper dive into just a few B2B SMS marketing examples.

1. Share inventory and order updates.

You may be a company whose audience has a lot to juggle. They may not have time to log in to a customer portal to track orders or check inventory levels. Along those same lines, automated email updates can be easily misplaced or overlooked (or can sometimes be routed to junk or spam folders, where they disappear forever).

To help your audience understand the progress of their orders, you can use B2B SMS marketing to send real-time text updates about inventory levels, order status, shipping details, and delivery windows.

This helps your audience know where their orders are, and when they’re set to arrive, so they can prevent small issues from turning into big problems. This level of proactive transparency can also help your audience build trust and confidence in your company, generating longer-lasting loyalty.

2. Timely reminders and notifications.

One of the most proven ways to drive audience retention is by keeping them properly informed about things that, without being properly alerted, can easily disrupt their workflow.

B2B SMS marketing provides you with a channel that can easily be used for delivering timely, highly accessible notifications about things like scheduled maintenance or the status of a Customer Service team troubleshooting an issue. With SMS as a channel you can provide your audience with peace of mind by ensuring they’ll never miss a message that requires their attention.

3. Educate and nurture relationships.

In B2B environments, complex buying decisions are often coupled with long sales cycles. Once your business makes a connection, it must be fostered and maintained if you want it to survive.

By taking time to identify what your audience needs, you can more confidently develop programs and messages that resonate with them and, therefore, produce results.

For example, you can leverage B2B SMS marketing to support continuous communication, cultivate loyalty, and nurture relationships by providing helpful information - like industry trends or new products - that will enable your audience to make more informed decisions.

You can also use SMS as a means of following up on opportunities to see how your company can help support their efforts.

You can even set up automated, response-driven drip campaigns using B2B texting. This allows you to send relevant content to the right audience at the right times.

Unlocking the Benefits of B2B Text Messaging

Companies make buying decisions differently than consumers. In the world of business, there are many stakeholders involved and layers of approval to go through before a deal can be made.

Sending SMS messages to your B2B audience allows you to put all the information they need right at their fingertips, without the lag time often associated with missed calls, unclear emails, or pieces of mail that don’t get passed along.

B2B text messaging offers other benefits, too.

Better engagement.

Text messages have much higher open rates and response rates compared to other communication platforms, such as email. In fact, the click-thru rate for SMS is 13 times higher than email.

Faster to launch.

Think about all the work that goes into building a call campaign or email message.

To create a sales call campaign, you must build scripts for cold and warm calls, as well as for voicemails. Then you must find time in your day to make the calls and track responses so that progress can be reviewed later.

Creating an email campaign requires the development of both the email’s content and the design work to create imagery and set up the message in an email marketing software platform in a visually appealing way.

SMS campaigns can be created and launched much faster than either of these approaches. No design skills or pictures are necessary (unless you want to include images in your message, of course), and you only need to write a sentence or two to communicate an effective message. Your B2B message campaigns can be ready to launch in minutes instead of hours.

Easier to track.

Depending on how you send your B2B SMS marketing messages, those text messages can be easily tracked in terms of open and response rates so you can see when messages are being delivered, read, and acted on. Tracking campaign results can also help you document your return on B2B SMS marketing investments.

Finally, you can test content and offers to see which campaigns and promotions perform the best.

Follow These 5 B2B SMS Marketing Best Practices

Following best practices for B2B SMS marketing can help you optimize communication, productivity, and outcomes. Here are a few recommendations to ensure success.

1. Make your message clear.

The shorter your messages are, the faster and easier they’ll be to read. Remember, you only have 160 characters to get your point across, so be brief and include a clear call to action (CTA) so recipients know exactly what to do after reading your message. Good CTA examples may include:

• Schedule a call
• Book a meeting
• Confirm today
• Start now
• Text to subscribe
• Get more info

2. Keep it personal.

After you’ve built a database of an audience that wants to hear from you via SMS, then you can create highly targeted content based on their preferences, behaviors, engagement, and purchase history.

For example, you can segment your audience into different groups based on whether they’re a new or returning customer, how much they’ve spent in the past, how recently they’ve purchased, etc. Each of these groups can be sent a different message based on what may appeal to them.

3. Create and stick to a plan.

Timing can influence the performance of your B2B SMS marketing campaigns. Unlike text messages that are sent to consumers, you likely want to keep workday schedules in mind when choosing appropriate send times, aiming to catch your audience during their most productive and responsive periods of the day.

4. Stay professional.

B2B SMS messaging is a great way to create a personal connection with a business, but you still want to be professional. For consistency and recognition, as well as to build trust and credibility, make sure the messages you send align with your brand and mission.

As a rule of caution, stay away from excessive capitalization or the overuse of punctuation (like too many exclamation marks!!!!!). Instead of aggressive sales pitches, prioritize education and value: you want to be informational and helpful to your audience so they feel like your text messages offer additional value that can’t be found elsewhere.

5. Analyze and act on performance.

Keep track of B2B SMS marketing results over time so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. That way, you can carry over the messaging and strategies that resonate while revisiting the ones that don’t. This will improve your engagement strategy over time.

Answering a Common Question: Is B2B Cold Texting Legal?

There are many stipulations around B2B cold calling and sending unsolicited email, but does the same hold true for B2B texting?

There are several sets of rules mandated by various parties that a company must abide by before you can begin to reach your audience through SMS, from The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to the CTIA.

Failure to comply with certain rules or requirements could result in steep penalties, such as hefty fines.

As SMS regulations change over time, it’s important to do your research to make sure you comply with the latest laws and requirements. Trusted mobile marketing partners who understand the importance of SMS compliance can support your mobile efforts by keeping you informed on the changing carrier, CTIA, federal and state regulations. 

Vibes Can Set You Up for Long-Term B2B Audience Engagement

As North America’s most trusted and last independent Tier 1 SMS aggregator, Vibes makes sure your messages take the fastest path possible to reach your audience. Our direct carrier connections and hands-on personal service pair the messaging reach and reliability with the trusted long-term relationship you deserve.

Want to integrate your existing tech stack for campaign and message personalization for your B2B audience? We also make it incredibly easy to maximize your technology investments by bringing enterprise-grade SMS into the tools your team already uses every day. This means you can create and easily feed thousands of event-triggered text messages through an API from your customer relationship management (CRM) or CDP (customer data platform).

Finally, we always keep our ears to the ground on the ever-changing mobile compliance laws and requirements, enabling us to provide general guidance around what you can—and can’t—do with your B2B SMS marketing.*

Get in touch with us to learn more about how we’re helping B2B businesses across multiple industries drive true engagement with their audience.

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*LEGAL NOTE: Vibes' mobile compliance guidance is not legal counsel. Companies must work directly with their own legal teams to determine what is required for their SMS campaigns.

The Bottom Line

B2B SMS marketing is a powerful tool that will transform how you interact with your audience. From time-sensitive alerts to promotions and field/employee enablement, the B2B SMS marketing use cases are plentiful.

Vibes is a trusted partner for businesses like yours that want to drive long-term B2B audience engagement and revenue. When your audience receives a text message from you, we’ll help you make sure they open it—and then act on it.

Learn more about our BMB SMS marketing platform.