Successfully using SMS in B2B Marketing with Mike Manheimer

While he is crushing the B2C space today, this special guest built his marketing skills over a long and successful tenure in B2B marketing. Mike Manheimer is the CMO and Head of Growth at PostScript, an SMS tool available for e-commerce sellers on Shopify, but he’s here to explain how the same principles can be applied in B2B.

Mike unveils the misconceptions holding marketers back from sending SMS, how the proper use of SMS can help you close deals, and why you need consent to have an effective SMS campaign.

Takeaways:

1. Before seeing the benefits of your first SMS campaign, you need to overcome the fear of sending it. SMS (short message service, eg: text messages) is an extremely intimate channel because your brand is placed among texts from prospects’ friends and families.
2. Don’t use the excuse that your ‘customers might not like it’ as the reason not to use SMS campaigns. As with anything in marketing, you need to test it. That’s how you will get feedback and data on the efficacy of SMS for your brand.
3. The bar for good SMS marketing is much higher than it is for good email marketing, meaning that you need to be much more thoughtful with the messages that you send.
4. After good discovery calls, sales reps should ask the prospects if they can reach out to them via text message in case they can’t contact them through email. This way the prospect opts into SMS messaging and the rep verifies the phone number.
5. During the B2B sales cycle, the rep that has built the relationship with the prospect should tell them that they prefer to communicate over text and ask if they can text them throughout the process to check-in. Prospects are becoming more open to this now.
6. SMS can be an extremely valuable tool to have for getting B2B deals closed, but in order to have it as a viable option, you need to build rapport with the prospect and then ask them if texting works for them.
7. Another way to both capture phone numbers and gain consent to send SMS messages is through on-site pop-ups, discounts, exclusives, etc. For example, offering a 20% discount in exchange for a phone number saw a 75% conversion rate.
8. An additional benefit to incorporating SMS into your marketing mix is that your communication with a prospect via SMS is not constrained to what they are doing on their computer at that time. You can directly connect to their phone and cut through the noise.

Quote of the Show:

• “All marketers know we make everything way more complicated than it needs to be. We forget that this entire game is about humans marketing to other humans” – Mike Manheimer

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemanheimer/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikemanheimer 
• Company website: https://postscript.io/ 

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music:https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7334aa0c-702a-47aa-8c55-760fa2cf4dda/the-revenue-driven-cmo
• Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-revenue-driven-cmo/id1638785560
• Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1OCuYchAG8TlGv82YARRhy?si=60a093a194c64c17
• Google Podcast:https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9tb3JlbWFya2V0aW5nLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz
• iHeart:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-the-revenue-driven-cmo-99614345/
• Listen Notes:https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic-rdU1oESluqs/
• YouTube:https://youtu.be/_O3yxvAOcEA

Featuring:

Mike ManheimerCMO, Postscript

Chris MechanicCEO & Co-Founder

Podcasts Info:

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