Email still rules the roost for B2B sales, but research shows that businesses that communicate using a combination of channels like social media, phone calls, and texting are the most effective. A successful B2B relationship helps to understand and address the demands of your clients and the needs of their end customers.
How can businesses leverage sms to drive sales?
B2B texting allows them to respond in real-time, while context is sometimes lost when there are gaps in response time sending emails back and forth. We will go over why using a business texting platform to drive sales is important and show some tips for boosting your customer conversion rate and keeping them engaged during the sales cycle and beyond.
Visibility and Transparency
Text messages are the most effective form of communication because they’re arguably much more visible than any other marketing medium. The message is delivered straight to your phone, which a majority (77%) use the default texting app on their phone.
A SMS has read rates nine out of ten times within the first 3 minutes of receiving the text message. The reply rate of a text is around 14%, which is substantially higher than emails that are steady around 4%. The higher response rate of SMS makes it easier to build and maintain quality B2B relationships.
The power of SMS is in its brevity. It's ability to get a message across quickly and casually makes it perfect for business professionals who are constantly on-the-go, but still need some formality when communicating with their clients or colleagues outside the office environment.
Staying professional in all business communications is key to creating a culture of transparency. This means limiting the use of inappropriate or off-topic comments, not relying too much on emojis, and monitoring quality control within your sales process so that you can ensure high customer experience for potential customers.
Manage and Nurture Customers Through Text
Building your network and maintaining relationships in the beginning stages of a B2B relationship is crucial. Attracting and engaging your customers by SMS has the personal touch of a phone call, but is less intrusive and has a casualness that allows the client to not have to immediately drop everything to answer. B2B texting isn't just about making a single sale, but helps build a strong, long lasting relationship with customers.
Clients purchase what they need for their business. They usually need something that contributes directly to their bottom line, like increasing their leads/sales through texting, or saving money by reducing the amount of time it takes to close a deal in a sales cycle. You’d be surprised what a well placed scheduled text message can do and you can do it all from a text app right on your phone or on a computer.
Respectful and relevant text conversations are key to convincing your customers that you're not a spammy company. In fact, 61% of customers want businesses to start contacting them through texting channels overflowing inboxes of unread emails. The future is texting and it will only keep growing, but make sure you include an opt-out option in your text as to give the consumer the option to not receive updates.
Low Cost and High ROI
B2B text messaging is a guaranteed way to improve sales, shorten the sales cycle, and increase revenue. One of the best selling points of adding SMS onto your existing B2B strategy is that it is relatively low cost (1000 messages cost less than $25) to start and it has ROI as high as x27. You can send a message and manage your contacts directly from your phone using TxtSquads texting app on Apple and Google's app stores or send message from your computer through a user-friendly web app.
SMS is becoming a workhorse of the B2B space and it's important for your business to keep up with its evolution. TxtSquad will help any business or organization close more deals, resolve customer support issues faster and build relationships with customers through our intuitive and easy to use texting B2B services.