Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
More than half the world’s population uses email. It is one of the most preferred means of communication today. For businesses, emails are a medium for account-based marketing. They help nurture leads, sell products, create brand awareness, drive website traffic and increase sales and revenue by conveying lucrative content to the target audience.
Sending emails to current and potential customers with the goal of improving your brand's standing, content engagement, and eventually landing a sale is an example of an effective email marketing campaign. Neglecting email marketing while carrying out your marketing strategy can be dangerous because it has the highest conversion rate compared to other marketing channels.
According to a 2020 Statista report, 3.9 billion people use their emails daily. By 2023, this number is projected to rise to 4.3 billion. Moreover, 78% of marketers have seen a steep increase in email engagement in the past year, based on Hubspot’s Not Another State of Marketing 2020 report. These statistics highlight the importance of email marketing in a marketing campaign.
Email Marketing: Implementation and Challenges
Ever since the pandemic hit, the importance of digital marketing has skyrocketed. Without utilizing all the digital marketing channels, it is impossible to reach the target audience. In the realm of successful digital marketing, email marketing has a big stake. It has the highest conversion rates, is preferred, and is simple and affordable.
In an interview with Media 7, Mike Dickerson, Chief Executive Officer at ClickDimensions talked about the importance of digital marketing in the current reality impacted by COVID-19.
"Digital marketing, and all the channels included within that, is more essential than ever before for businesses around the globe."
Businesses use email marketing to build brand credibility, deliver crisp and accurate messages to their target audience, and generate leads. They strengthen existing customer relationships, boost sales and achieve higher ROI, gauge the response of customers to content through metrics, and automate marketing workflows to streamline marketing processes. By interconnecting their marketing channels, they create a fluid buyer journey to increase the chances of conversion.
Like every other marketing campaign, an effective email marketing campaign needs effort, vigilance, testing, and upgrading. Email marketing can be challenging, but the good news is that you can remedy the issues easily. Here are some snags you might hit:
Ideal Email Frequency
Achieving the right frequency of emails can be challenging. If you send too many emails, the recipient might unsubscribe from your email list. However, if you don’t send enough emails, the recipient might not remember your brand. You can review your subscription process to know what frequency and information you have promised your recipients. You can consider revising the frequency based on the click rate, subscribe and unsubscribe rates, and post-click activity.
Low Subscriber Engagement
If your subscribers are not engaging with the emails, you can start by testing the segments and personalizing the content.
Data Syncing
You need to ensure that the data that comes from CRM and ESP responses is synced.
Irrelevant Content
Keep reviewing your click-through rates to pinpoint content that works. If your content is not relevant, your subscribers might stop opening your emails and may go as far as unsubscribing. Content includes everything from your subject line to your call to action, so make sure your content quality is high.
Unsatisfactory Campaign Results
If your delivery rates are lower than expected, consider subscribing to a list validation tool and reevaluating your subscription process. If the open rates are too low, try using different ‘from’ names to create a better impact. If the click rates are low, then align your content with your goals.
Creating Effective Email Marketing Campaigns for Business Success
To create an effective email marketing campaign, follow these crucial steps:
Decide Your Goal
Efforts without direction go nowhere. Define and understand the goals of your campaign. They can be anything from increasing website traffic, lead nurturing, creating brand awareness, or getting customer feedback. Aim for tangible results once you figure out what you want to achieve. Your goals should ideally align with larger organizational goals.
Define Your Target Audience
Identify the unique needs and pain points of the customer base you want to target. Create special campaigns for a specific group of customers. You can segment the customers based on their age, location, interests, gender, online activity, or engagement levels.
Choose a Relevant Type of Email Campaign
Depending on your campaign goal and target audience, choose a relevant email campaign. Some of the most popular email campaigns include welcome emails, cart abandonment campaigns, newsletters, re-engagement emails, announcements, holidays, invitations, promotional, seasonal, and testimonial or rating emails. These email campaigns can be executed using marketing automation workflows.
Time Your Campaign Correctly
Timing is important for effective email marketing campaigns. For maximum engagement, consider the ideal day of the week and time of day. Based on data from co-schedule, the best days to send out emails are Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday, while the ideal timings are 10AM, 2AM, and 8PM. Proactively verifying your target audience’s time zone and location before starting your campaign is advisable. Marketing automation makes it easy to time your campaign effectively.
Use a Conversational Tone
Nobody wants to read drab emails with no personal touch. For the recipients to respond, you need to create a relatable copy and an attractive subject line that compels them to open your email.
How Conversational Emails Helped the Obama Campaign with Fundraising
By using a conversational tone in the email and creating effective, attention-grabbing subject lines, the Obama Campaign raised a huge chunk of the $690 million.
They used great opt-in forms, which helped them collect more email leads. They also sent a follow-up/thank you page to encourage subscribers to donate to the campaign. They also kept on constantly testing email conversions using split testing of key pages.
Test Your Emails
A/B testing your emails is a good way to understand which of your email designs and content creates the most impact. Look at campaign performance metrics like open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, spam complaints, and unsubscribes.
Make Great Opt-ins
Experiment with different opt-in forms like welcome gates, exit pop-ups, and lightbox pop-ups. They can help you get new subscribers.
Focus on Design and Content
Your content should offer value to your recipient. It should also be pleasant to look at, concise, and effective. Focusing on the design and content elements is vital to the success of your campaign.
Wrapping it Up
If executed correctly, effective email marketing campaigns can be a game-changer for your conversions and, in turn, your revenue.
FAQ
What are the benefits of email marketing?
Effective email marketing campaigns help businesses create brand awareness, outreach to new and existing customers, and achieve high conversions.
What are the important email marketing metrics?
Some of the important email marketing metrics are open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, spam complaints, and unsubscribes.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Intent data is a modern sales intelligence tool that helps you capture a prospect’s buying signals. By using an effective intent data strategy, you can be the first to reach out to a prospect and aim for a conversion.
In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the importance of data in converting leads.
“With access to valuable data, marketers are focused on leads that are more likely to become buyers. They can also work on targeting their messaging towards these potential buyers.”
According to SalesIntel, 97% of B2B marketers agree that intent data will give brands a competitive edge.
Intent data collects signals that come from consumption of content like:
Blogs and infographics
Product comparisons
Product reviews
Message boards
Case studies
News
However, it can be challenging to incorporate intent data into marketing and sales initiatives. Regardless of whether you're working with first-party, second-party, or third-party intent data, it can have multiple applications across a range of systems and workflows and may overwhelm your team.
An excellent B2B intent data approach can ease the process and use of intent data. Motivate your team to harness the power of intent data to drive business growth.
5 Essential Elements of an Intent Data Strategy
52% of B2B tech companies implement an intent data strategy in their account-based marketing program. (Source: SalesIntel)
This statistic shows that more and more B2B marketers are seeking the help of intent data to make their account targeting more effective.
Let us look at what essential steps you should take while integrating B2B intent data into your account-based marketing program.
Alignment: Your Intent Data Strategy Should Line up with Your ABM Strategy
To get the results you expect, synchronize it with your ABM marketing strategy. You can use intent data in different ways to optimize your account-based marketing. Here are two of the many ways it can help you with target account prioritization:
Bind the intent data to your ICP criteria. Which ones show buyer intent out of the accounts that match your ICP? This information can help your marketing team push these accounts further into the funnel. Your sales reps will have meaningful communication with these target accounts. Overall, the chances of conversion will go up because you know the intent of your ICP-based target accounts.
There may be net new accounts showing buyer intent but they fall outside your pre-defined ICP. Segment these accounts and increase your sales pipeline. If your company doesn't have a lot of data, this use case can help you change or define your ICP criteria and help your sales pipeline.
Buy-In: Bring Your Teams Together
For all the teams to come together and work towards the same business goals and objectives, you need to get buy-in from the C-suite of your company. Only your leadership can drive your sales and teams to break silos and work with the mindset of establishing processes and using tactics that can create harmony between them. Ensure that the teams understand what you want to achieve with intent data for ABM. Share it with them and align on a follow-up strategy, metrics, and key accounts. Set up training programs so that your teams understand the newness and precision that intent data will bring to account-based marketing.
Testing: Begin with a Small Pilot
Apply your strategy to a small set of accounts. Involve limited sales team members within your company, probably a team you are closely associated with, to oversee the use of intent data in B2B marketing through your ABM program. This can help you understand where the strategy needs to be tweaked and what approach you need to use while using intent data. Pilot testing is an effective way of streamlining and recording your processes. It can be the foundation for implementing all your intent data initiatives for other sales teams over time. Get everyone on board to analyze the results of your pilot test and then decide on the best way to integrate intent data into your account-based marketing program.
Analysis: Examine the Performance Metrics
To gauge the impact of intent data on your account-based marketing program, you must collect conversion rates before the pilot test. This way, you can compare the before and after rates and examine how intent data helps ABM. Marketing and sales teams can look at what works and eliminate what doesn’t. This learning curve is crucial before you use intent data companywide.
Integration: Collate Your Systems with Intent Data
You can amplify the impact of your data strategy by integrating it with your systems like CRM, marketing automation software, and ABM platform. Through intent-based marketing, you can increase the performance and visibility of your brand throughout the sales funnel. Integration can also spearhead landing deals and expand your account-based strategy across different domains.
Implementing an intent data strategy step-by-step can lead to success and benefit all teams across all departments, increase customer satisfaction, and enable you to scale your business.
Kazoo Saw a 2-3x Increase in Reply Rates after Using Bombora’s Company Surge
Kazoo, an employee experience platform, integrated data from Bombora’s Company Surge buyer intent data tool with its 6sense account engagement platform data. It saw a 2-3x increase in reply rates.
Conclusion
When combined with additional data, B2B intent data can help you develop a scoring model that considers fit and engagement, making it more effective. If you use intent data in B2B marketing correctly, it can be a great way to improve your ABM strategy.
FAQ
How can an intent data strategy enhance ABM?
It can help in ABM marketing by indicating early buyer interest, facilitating content personalization, and helping with creating targeted account lists and lead scoring.
How can sales and marketing teams benefit from intent data?
Sales and marketing teams can use intent data for ABM to create effective go-to-market strategies, accurate target account segmentation, and personalized outreach.
What does intent data do to improve lead scoring?
Intent data provides predictive purchase insights. With the help of this information, you can approach the accounts close to making purchase decisions.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | October 7, 2022
The Pareto Principle is introduced by an Italian economist - Vilfredo Pareto. According to this principle, for several results, 80% of the outcomes arise from 20% of the cause. Other variations of the Pareto principle states: 80% of the sales come from 20% of customers or 80% of marketing engagement comes from 20% of accounts.
Many researchers believe that ABM is a descendent of the 80/20 rule. By following this rule, businesses can spend the bulk on creating personalized marketing campaigns for the 20% of customers who spent the most on the product or services of their company.
How the Pareto Rule Brings Sales Growth?
In ABM, the Pareto principle can be used as a guide to overcoming the business growth obstacle and acquiring extremely productive business solutions. So here are a few strategies that will assist in bringing the resources and attention to the top 20% of customers.
1. Identify Best Customers
Companies might have hundreds or thousands of customers or prospect lists either from email, social media, or by the website. To ensure making a wise choice, it is a must to have a glance at the historical data of every account, then compare it with the ideal customer profile and determine which makes it to the list of the best customers. After finding the top customers for the business, assure to mark them as a top priority.
2. Locating Their Area
An important factor is to check the Point-of-Sale platform and find the area from where the highest number of best customers belongs to. It will lead to determining the most suitable sales or marketing strategies that can boost the growth of the organization.
3. Rank The Need Of Customers
After creating the list of best accounts or customers, try to dig a bit deeper and discover the want, need, or problems each customer has. If in case, the insight is not up to the mark, a company will have to form a team that can gather some information, by:
Tracking customer’s social media
Having a conversation with the customer
Purchasing Insights from vendors.
After finalizing the need list make sure to mark each with their importance and address them accordingly.
4. Offer Personalization Across Different Platform
Marketing according to the way that connects with each customer deeply without engulfing the resource and budget can be achieved by making the process as automated as possible through hiring developers. Some of how businesses can personalize their channels are:
Using images that shows the customer’s interested area
Addressing each customer by their name
Sharing related case studies with the customers
Including a personalized note
Remember to keep a track of the progress you made through these steps and modify your list and strategies based on them.
Take Away!
If used properly, the Pareto rule in account-based marketing helps a business in keeping the focus on what matters the most. It stops enterprises from multi-tasking all the time. With the help of the 80/20 rule, businesses can properly allocate time and resources to the areas that produce the best results. That being said, relocating the budget while cultivating time for referrals from the customers who generate long-term advantages is the core to sustainable growth.
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Targeted Account Strategy
Article | November 26, 2021
Have you browsed about account-based marketing and how successful it has proved for businesses? Do you wonder whether your business fits in the ABM strategy? And even if you practice ABM, what is to be done differently for your business?
Well, we have answers to all your questions.
As Clive Armitage, CEO at Agent3, said,“We have to act as the eyes and ears of marketing innovation for our clients; they trust us to help them navigate the pace of change in the way that the process of marketing is evolving.”
Thus, your marketing and sales team should be on the same page to deliver an excellent and personalized customer experience.
The implementation of ABM in different industries may be different but the challenges faced are somewhat the same.
The baisc challenge for ABM are personalization and quality content.
So, let us dig deeper into how ABM works for different industry segments. And also focus on how each industry should strategize for successful account-based marketing.
How Is ABM Different for Different Industries?
Every company has different products to sell to various companies. Also, if you sell the same product to distinct companies, you need a unique tactic for every organization.
Account-based marketing is crafting such individual approaches for every client that matters.
For example, if you are an advertising company and you need a luxury car brand account, your ABM strategy will be different for different car brands. It can also be designed differently for every decision-maker.
Thus, you have to be very focused and delicately plan strategies for the target account.
Apart from the people you target, also keep in mind the industry segment that you target. It will help to align strategies with both brands.
Now let us discuss some different types of ABM strategies that work for distinct industry segments.
Types of ABM Strategies (with Real-time Examples)
ABM is a beneficial strategy for all types of companies. But it works wonders for organizations that target large companies who have relatively long sales cycles.
According to the State of Account-Based Revenue Engine 2019 report, organizations saw a whooping 91% improved ROI post-ABM implementation.
Hence, let us see how different ABM strategies have their way of working.
Events
Events have proved to be the most successful of all the ABM strategies.
Once target clients accept the personalized invites to the events, the sales team can easily have in-person meetings. Also, a souvenir, gift, or a creative way of a follow-up meeting should be an incorporated strategy of the event.
Example:
Thomas Reuters is an organization that provides news and information tools for professionals. Their challenge was retention and expansion with their key accounts. Thus, they created an event opportunity for these accounts.
In these events, the top executives of the exclusive accounts could speak. And Thomas Reuters would quote them in whitepapers, blogs, and more.
It ensured that the sales team would be in contact with the key accounts all year round. Thus, it increased retention and built good relations.
Webinars
A webinar is an option when the physical presence of clients at a similar geographical location is not possible.
But a webinar allows curating a more personalized experience and at convenient times with less utility of resources.
Example:
HotJar Lightning Talks conference is a webinar hosted by HotJar. This webinar gives the speaker maximum of five minutes to address a particular topic. Thus, no long presentation but just a short glimpse of informative or marketing strategies.
Businesses participate in the webinar to present the challenges and solutions to their prospective clients.
Thus, HotJar had many B2B clients participating in the conference and, the idea became a big hit!
Direct Mails
Gifts, marketing material, and creative packages sent through direct mail are a success in ABM. However, account-based marketing requires personalization and direct mail is the best tactic to deliver that.
Example:
Billing Tree is a technology-driven payment processing organization.
It faced the challenge of scheduling meetings with the targeted accounts. Thus, they mailed 100 locked cases secured with two combinations of padlocks. These cases contained US$ 100 Amazon gift cards. Billing Tree gave the combination once they got the appointment with the account.
And once the client opened the case, the lid had a video player embedded in it that played the video pitch for the account.
Billing Tree generated an account engagement rate of 60% with the ABM strategy of direct mail.
Advertising
Personalized advertising has become an easy thing, thanks to IP targeting and re-targeting technology. It allows you to target the big fishes rather than the traditional wide net fishing.
Example:
DocuSign is an eSignature transaction management and solution provider company. It wanted to generate more traffic and click-through rates to form gated content.
The company executed personalized ad campaigns to the target accounts that contained industry-specific images, content, and peer logos. And with detailed web analytics, they targeted the accounts at specific times.
This personalized ads ABM strategy boosted DocuSign’s age views by 300% with a massive conversion rate!
Personalized Website Experience
Technology these days has expanded its horizons to provide incredible experiences, and personalized website experience is one of those. Once you get the technicalities right, your target accounts can have an out-of-the-world personalized experience when they visit the desired page or the website.
Example:
Savi provides sensor analytics solutions for organizations. Their main client bases are the ones that give critical decisions based on the location and status of people. Thus, Savi has to deal with private and government organizations.
Therefore, as a part of specific marketing and sales strategy, they personalized their home pages differently for different clients.
Thus, when government organizations the homepage was:
And for the corporates, the page was:
Ways to Implement ABM
According to the 2020 State of ABM Report, 94.2% of respondents have successfully implemented this marketing strategy.
Thus, you too can implement account-based marketing with these simple steps.
Identify your high-value clients.
Conduct extensive research on those clients.
Strategize your personalized ABM campaigns.
Implement the account-based marketing strategy.
Analyze the campaign regularly.
Importance of Personalization
Personalization is a crucial part of account-based marketing. Your extensive research about the clients helps you craft unique, creative, and personalized content for them.
A personalized experience ensures an enriched and engaging customer experience.
If a campaign exclusively provides solutions to pain points, clients become customers for life. It also helps to develop good relations.
Remember, account-based marketing is not only about conversions but also about creating brand awareness and relationships.
As Andy Bacon, VP Consulting at Momentum, has quoted, “ABM is all about building better quality relationships; the ROI will follow.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Do different industries need different account-based marketing strategies?
The meaning of account-based marketing is to provide tailored solutions to exclusive clients. So yes, different industries will require different ABM strategies.
One should use distinct and personalized approaches to target different people of the same organization. However, you have to ensure that the marketing message is the same for all, despite the personalization.
What are the different types of account-based marketing methods?
The different types to implement ABM strategies are:
Events
Webinars
Direct Mails
Advertising
Personalized Website Experience
Social Media
What role does personalization play in ABM?
ABM is all about personalization. The more personalized your content is, the more likely the chances are for conversion.
Imagine someone selling you a product designed just for solving your problems. You do not even need convincing if it is the answer to all your pain points. That is the same way in which ABM works.
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