SMS to retailers' merchant phones produced our highest-converting channel

We sell B2B e-commerce infrastructure to mid-market retailers — the kind of companies running 5-50 store locations plus an online presence. Our buyer is usually the head of operations or the owner-operator.

These people don’t check email all day. They live on their phones, mostly answering supplier calls and managing store ops.

The SMS experiment

About six weeks into our engagement, SmarterOutbound suggested testing SMS to merchant phones. I was uncomfortable about it — felt invasive, felt like we’d get reported. Their compliance angle was that we’d source numbers via legitimate channels, identify ourselves clearly, and honor opt-outs immediately. We tested with a list of 200 contacts.

The results from the SMS test:

• 11% reply rate (industry average for cold SMS is under 3%).
• Most replies were polite “not interested” or “send me an email” — both of which gave us useful data.
• 6 booked discovery calls from the 200 sends.
• Zero complaints, zero spam reports.

Why this matters

For comparison, the same 200 contacts had been emailed twice and LinkedIn-DMed once before the SMS went out. Email had produced 1.9% reply rate and LinkedIn 4.2%. SMS was almost three times the next-best channel.

We’ve now scaled SMS to about 600 messages per week. It’s our highest-converting channel and the meetings from SMS are the highest-intent (the people who reply to SMS are the people who actually wanted to talk).

Four stars because

The volume is lower than the other channels. SMS isn’t a high-throughput play. If you’re trying to fill an entire sales team’s calendar from cold outbound, SMS alone will not do it.

Also: the compliance side was complicated. We had a 30-minute call with our lawyer about TCPA implications. SmarterOutbound’s compliance docs were thorough but this isn’t a “set it and forget it” channel — you need to actively manage it.

Recommendation

If you sell to a buyer who lives on their phone — retailers, restaurant operators, healthcare providers, real estate, anyone who isn’t deskbound — SMS deserves to be in your channel mix. Just do it through someone who handles the compliance side correctly.