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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Account Based Analytics
Article | August 3, 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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Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
B2B businesses use various marketing techniques to increase revenue. Most marketers run campaigns to target a wide range of audiences. But strategies are rarely successful in the B2B world. Moreover, these companies are forced to sell to a narrow list of prospects. So, they use a combination of inbound and account-based marketing techniques to make the magic happen. But, most of them probably aren't marketing the right way.
Similarly, if the sales team fails to align with marketing in your company, perhaps, it's time to try something new. Because, as a marketer, you already know how difficult it is to decide on marketing aspects. Of course, none of these are convincing unless you aren't aware of account-based marketing and its clear and observable benefits.
The benefits of Account-Based Marketing can help you to know accurately how to measure marketing ROI. In addition, the benefits can button-up marketing-to-sales alignment, reduce or maintain the size of the sales force you need, and cater to your marketing message to specific targeted accounts.
The list of advantages and benefits of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is endless. But, here is an attempt through the ten most valuable ones that'll push your marketing goals with ABM.
An Opportunity to Get Personal
Personalization is an essential benefit of Account-Based Marketing! ABM technology allows marketers to create more personalized messaging for specific accounts instead of creating blanket messaging for a larger number of accounts. When approaching a specific account, spending as much time and effort as creating relevant content is essential, which provides value for your targeted account.
For instance, instead of creating bulk email marketing, your efforts would work better if there is direct messaging or account-targeted ads for your accounts.
Faster Sales Process
Depending on your business, industry, and resources, the sales cycle typically looks something like this:
1) Prospect → 2) Connect → 3) Research → 4) Present → 5) Close → 6) Delight
Several investors are involved in making a final purchase decision. This can often slow down your sales and marketing process. But when you do account-based marketing, it allows making the process faster. With ABM, you get the opportunity to specifically nurture your primary decision stage, along with all relevant accounts, to facilitate the sales process.
However, with the concept of ABM, you can communicate individually to every stakeholder in an account. Hence, this would make the individual sales process faster and longer, yet very effective.
Clearer Path to ROI
ABM is precise, targeted, and measurable. And it helps you maximize your ROI. With personalization as one of the most effective marketing tactics, you select only valuable accounts, which boost your sales, and thus, ROI increases. In addition, the approach makes your team easily align sales with consistent marketing that grows ROI.
Here are some stats to support this benefit of Account-based Marketing:
Response rates from ABM accounts: 47%
Online activities: 39%
Number of new contacts in accounts: 36%
Participation in all marketing activities: 25%
Set an Appropriate Marketing Budget
A sound ABM strategy would help your marketing team focus on the targeted accounts on the various touchpoints to explore during their buying journey. Scaling ABM techniques will save a lot on your allotted marketing budget, which has been wasted on useless leads before.
From a marketing budget perspective, ABM is the best way to go for any B2B communication coupled with the newest ABM tools and strategies to target specific organizations or companies.
Experience Lesser Risk Possibilities
This benefit of account-based marketing can significantly reduce unnecessary waste and risk factors. By scaling ABM marketing strategies, you can do more. Smart ABM technology helps the same number of account managers to target, market, convert, and upsell a much larger number of accounts personally. This means there's much less risk involved. Therefore, with ABM tactics adequately set up, accounts become revolving doors—even if one contact is lost, another one will walk right in. It's that simple—ABM is a no-brainer.
Better Reporting
Your marketing campaign's effectiveness can be measured using ABM metrics. And, the truth is, the more tangible these metrics are, the more clearly you can target your account.
The main benefit of account-based marketing is that there are fewer metrics you're required to keep track of, which helps you to report better. This makes it easier to set marketing goals. And so, analyzing reports becomes a breeze compared to pulling out large sets of data from different accounts. This is because you tend to spend more time assessing each aspect of the efforts put in by you. So, the metrics help to document relevant data for all the accounts and set better goals at the end of the quarter.
So, if you're sure of your target audience, ABM is the way to go!
Sales Alignment Becomes Much Better
ABM technology provides a supplementary targeted marketing initiative, which directly aligns sales and marketing teams to work together & keep track of their efforts and goals. With that, purpose-driven activities like communication code, the collaterals to be shared, the tone of messages, and the ultimate content are put in sync between marketing and sales teams. So that these directly address the unique needs of each account.
Trust-Based Customer Relations
Companies are always looking for solutions to their problems online. In this case, ABM provides them a personalized solution through communication. Be it through blogs, whitepapers, videos, or social media, as they naturally get attracted to you if you offer to solve their problems. This further creates trust between the two. A relationship based on trust is a relationship that can lead to good sales, and future referrals may be.
Make Data-Driven Decision
As there are many benefits of account-based marketing, it effectively encourages marketers to make data-driven decisions. ABM creates a framework for sales and marketing teams to make data-driven decisions after targeting specific accounts. And then market to maximize upsell or create cross-selling opportunities by identifying prospects in the future.
The Right Target, the Right Leads
The concept of ABM is revolutionary. Its marketing methodology focuses on scoring the right leads as opposed to many leads. Why spend half of your team's energy on low-profit clients to create low-level leads when one right kind of lead can help your business to earn a double-digit revenue? As with ABM, you get to target only the accounts most likely to your business; therefore, the right leads are generated. This leads to more revenue than those hundreds of the wrong leads. This is the ultimate benefit of account-based marketing that ultimately runs your business!
ABM makes B2B marketing interesting and sensible completely.
Now you know the benefits of Account-Based Marketing. Just that you need is to implement ABM strategies and see its magic and how your business grows better than ever!
Frequently Asked Questions
How does ABM work?
ABM focuses on identifying accounts, which means companies that match ideal clients and target critical decision-makers with personalized messages and content through advertising campaigns. Content forms such as blogs, social media, and whitepapers work well with the ABM strategy.
Who uses Account-Based Marketing?
Generally, marketers prefer doing account-based marketing to identify target accounts, personalize the marketing and campaign experience. Thus, allowing the sales team to convert accounts into leads.
Does account-based marketing work?
Yes, account-based marketing works indeed. It encourages the marketing and sales team to identify target accounts, craft customized campaigns for accounts, and align individual accounts through the pipeline before and after converting into leads.
How to use ABM?
To use the ABM platform, here are the steps explained:
Identify targets while setting up an effective ABM strategy
Understand the targets
Define and personalize content formats
Choose relevant channels
Offer solutions
Measure & mold
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Core ABM
Article | January 20, 2022
Account-based marketing has been around since the early 2000s, but only recently have businesses started to implement it widely in their marketing strategies. By focusing on ideal customer profiles (ICP), businesses shortlist key accounts and target them with customized content campaigns to convert them from marketing-qualified leads to buyers. An account-based marketing strategy uses sales and marketing orchestration to transform the way key accounts are approached.
ABM marketing contributed to a 70 percent increase in the number of opportunities created. (Source: Gartner)
Nash Haywood, Global Director-Digital Conversion & Paid Media, Genesys, talked about ABM’s impact on how sales and marketing teams function.
“We wanted to have more control of the entire (marketing and sales) process, and an ABM approach allowed us to do that.”
B2B account-based marketing drives valuable engagement and leads to higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Benefits of Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing benefits range from increased marketing efficiency and higher ROI to higher engagement and retention. Let us take a look at them in detail:
ABM Enhances Your Marketing Efforts
ABM marketing is data-driven. Account-based management becomes easy with crucial data like role, industry, and buyer journey stage. Based on this data, appealing personalized content campaigns are created to target key accounts. These campaigns optimize your marketing efforts. They also give insights on which channels and messages appeal to your targeted key accounts so that you can refine your account-based marketing strategy. According to Emarketer, 46 percent of marketers are benefitting from real-time optimization to accelerate their pipeline revenue.
Sales and Marketing Teams Synchronize
An account-based marketing campaign aligns the goals of the sales and marketing teams. It also brings other important stakeholders, like the IT team and the executive team, together to create an effective strategy for achieving goals.
Sales and marketing orchestration can lead to a massive increase in marketing revenue (up to 208 percent as stated by MarketingProfs).
ABM Improves Marketing Efficiency
Account-based marketing automation technology helps streamline marketing processes and scale ABM implementation across different marketing campaigns. Activities like ad targeting, modelling, upselling media buying, and executing lead nurturing campaigns can be done efficiently using account-based marketing software. You can cease marketing to accounts that do not respond to your campaigns and focus on the ones that do. This can help you save your money and allocate your time and resources better.
You Retain Customers Better
ABM uses hyper-personalized content to pursue higher customer engagement and retention. By showing key accounts the content they want to see, brand awareness and trust are increased. An account-based marketing campaign, especially one created to engage target accounts, contributes to an enhanced customer experience that makes B2B marketing significantly impactful. It translates to long-term associations and bigger deal sizes.
You Close Deals Faster
You can move key accounts through the sales funnel swiftly and close deals faster by identifying decision-makers of your key accounts. B2B account-based marketing saves time and resources, which can be used to generate new leads. That is why this is one of the most important account-based marketing benefits.
ABM Improves Deal Sizes
Account-based B2B marketing targets only key accounts with buyer intent. It is about quality more than quantity, and this makes a whole lot of difference in how you approach accounts and strike deals. A shorter sales cycle through account-based marketing means landing a big account that signs away more money than many small accounts would.
You Get a Higher ROI
According to a report by ITSMA, 87 percent of marketers stated that ABM delivered a higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies. Since account-based marketing is a data-driven strategy that uses personalized content to target accounts, this approach is easier and more cost-effective as it saves time and resources because of its precision.
ABM Performance Is Measurable
Account-based reporting is a key account-based marketing benefit. Using metrics like engagement, brand awareness, target account reach, retention, ROI, and influence helps you understand how well your ABM strategy is working. You can optimize your strategy to make it perform better.
ABM Makes You the Expert
While implementing account-based B2B marketing, you gain deep insights into the conversion behaviours, preferences, challenges, and needs of your target accounts. This knowledge makes you an expert in offering solutions that your target accounts crave. It also helps with new service or product design ideas that can cater to customers in a more personal way.
Creating an ABM Strategy That Works
To create an account-based marketing program that works, follow these steps:
1. Define the key accounts you want to target.
2. Identify the decision-makers for these accounts.
3. Create hyper-personalized content for them.
4. Zero in on appropriate channels to get maximum impact.
5. Create impressive content campaigns to increase engagement.
6. Measure the success of your campaigns using the correct metrics.
Account-based Marketing Services to Scale Your ABM Strategy
To adopt ABM at scale for exponential business growth, you need to evaluate your target accounts and then expand your ABM strategy from a small scale to a full-blown ABM. Your expansion can also be across new segments or businesses based on industry or company size. Artificial intelligence and marketing automation make it easier to implement ABM at scale.
Account-based marketing services offered by companies that specialize in ABM and marketing like Marketo, Terminus, Demandbase, Optimizely, and Oracle make it easier to implement an ABM strategy at scale. These companies offer services to attract and convert prospects, scale up your marketing, and grow customer relationships through up-selling and cross-selling.
Account-based marketing automation, email marketing, lead management, account-based management, social marketing, digital advertising, mobile marketing, multi-channel marketing, account-based reporting using ABM metrics and optimization along with account-based marketing software can help you scale your ABM strategy without breaking a sweat.
How SAP Created New Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM
SAP launched an account-based marketing program to target the company's top 10% of key accounts. These accounts were responsible for a third of their revenue in America. Through their ABM program, they offered specialized marketing plans for these accounts. SAP gained new pipeline opportunities and moved $57 million down the pipeline because of the benefits of account-based marketing.
Summing It Up
The time to implement ABM in your marketing strategy is now. Adopting it into your marketing strategy can help scale your business and achieve your business goals.
FAQ
What are the benefits of account-based marketing?
Some noteworthy account-based marketing benefits are: higher ROI, sales and marketing alignment, customer retention, and a shorter sales cycle.
Which metrics measure ABM performance?
Metrics like engagement, ROI, customer churn rate, content engagement, conversion rate, and average deal size are used to measure the performance of an ABM program.
Why is ABM more efficient compared to other marketing strategies?
ABM targets accounts with buyer intent, helps with better resource allocation and is cost effective. These factors contribute to a higher ROI and bring great results.
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