Why Should Businesses Incorporate Conversational Marketing in ABM?

Core ABM

Article | June 20, 2023

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.

Core ABM

Article | July 27, 2022

In any company, there is a sales function and a marketing function. They are supposed to work together to help the organization secure business, earn revenue, and facilitate growth. Oftentimes, because of the nature of their business, sales and marketing work at cross purposes and they lose focus on their ultimate objective of identifying, creating, and retaining customers. In this article, we will discuss how sales and marketing can work together to form an effective B2B sales funnel. But first, let’s explore the roles of sales and marketing within an organization. Sales are the function of driving revenue with salespeople who follow a defined sales process. A typical sales process involves a research phase to ensure that the intended customer is a good fit to the company’s Ideal Customer Profile, a discovery phase where the salesperson gets to know the customer, understand their needs, and see where their solution can help solve the customer’s problem, a demonstration phase where the seller lets the buyer envision how their solution for a product or service can satisfy the buyer’s need. A proposal phase is proactive and where the seller provides the customer with an outline of the work they will undertake and at what price. Sometimes a seller will instead be responding to a buyer’s request for a proposal (RFP). Up until this point in the sales process, prospective customers are referred to as “suspects,” meaning that they may be a good fit, but they have not expressed any interest in the company’s solutions and the company has not proposed any ways in which it could be of service. However, once a salesperson provides the prospective customer with a proposal, that prospective customer becomes known as a “prospect.” In sales, the measurement of potential revenue and its progress towards realization is called a sales “funnel.” In a sales funnel, the probability of the salesperson closing the sale is now weighted with percentages demonstrating the likelihood of success. In the sales process, opportunities are weighted based on their probability of closing. This is called opportunity management and it looks something like this: 0% of the prospect is identified by researching the intended sales target company. 10% of the prospect is prequalified as a potential good fit in alignment with the company’s Ideal Customer Profile (I.D.C.). 25% of the prospect is qualified via a discovery call, and the opportunity is loaded into the sales funnel. 40% is when the buyer agrees to a demonstration, shows genuine buying interest, and is open to receiving a proposal. 50% is the assessment phase where the seller determines if the buyer has Budget, Authority, Need, and the Timeframe for implementation, (B.A.N.T.). Another component of the sale to be addressed at this phase is “why,” as in, “Why is the buyer making this purchase decision, why is my company being considered, and why is this timeframe for implementation important?” 60% is when a proposal is submitted to the buyer for consideration. (Pro tip: A good salesperson will have the boilerplate components of the contract pre-vetted by legal and IT when the proposal is initially submitted to the buyer so that the contract does not get held up at the bottom of the funnel by any issues not within the buyer’s control when it is ready to close). 75% is the negotiation phase where the buyer/decision-maker(s) asks clarifying questions that show an intent to purchase or express some objections that the seller will need to overcome to move the sale forward. 90% is when both parties agree to all the conditions of the purchase and the final contract is submitted for signature. 100% is when the sale is closed and the revenue can be recognized. If the funnel can be trusted, and oftentimes that’s a big “if” because salespeople are not always disciplined in opportunity management, then revenue recognized can be forecasted beginning at 75% of probability. At every phase of the sales funnel, sales are conducted by calling, emailing, texting, or other outreach to prospective and existing customers to guide them towards making a purchase. The process might be consultative, taking place over a long period and involving multiple decision-makers in which the salesperson learns about the customer and their pain points, and then helps them understand how their product or service offering can provide a solution. Sales could also be tactical and a very short process involving just a single conversation with a salesperson before an agreement is finalized. Although technology and social media have certainly influenced how sales are conducted, the essential steps of the sales process have pretty much remained the same. Whereas sales are hands-on, marketing is a much more comprehensive process that does not generally interact with an individual customer but is designed to increase awareness of a brand or product to target customers as a group. Unlike sales, the methods, tactics, and channels used by marketers have evolved tremendously over the last fifteen years. Marketing today is primarily digital and includes content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, organic website traffic, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and the use of influencers and brand ambassadors. The objective of the marketing department is to generate leads for the sales department. These leads start as “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) and although these prospective buyers are not yet ready to purchase, they have expressed interest in a company’s product. When properly nurtured by the marketing department, these prospects become “sales qualified leads” (SQL’s) and are handed off by the marketing team to the sales team when they are likely to make a purchase. This nurturing can occur via social media, email distribution, or other communication from the marketing team to keep the prospective client interested and engaged. It would seem so easy for marketing to cultivate leads and hand them off to the sales team. However, this is often not the case. Too frequently marketing and sales are simply misaligned. Just consider these statistics: According to Upland, 55% of marketers don’t know which collateral their sales colleagues are most likely to use. LinkedIn reports that only 46% of marketers describe sales and marketing as “highly aligned” at their company. The Precision Marketing Group states that 25% of businesses describe their sales and marketing as either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned”. This lack of synchronization between marketing and sales causes poor execution and lost opportunities. According to LinkedIn’s Art of Winning Report, an estimated $1 trillion a year is lost due to a lack of sales and marketing coordination in the US alone. An industry survey by InsideView found that the six biggest obstacles to sales and marketing working together were: Lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects (43%) Communication (43%) Use of different metrics (41%) Broken/flawed processes (37%) Lack of accountability on both sides (25%) Reporting challenges (21%) Simply put, marketing and sales need to collaborate more effectively to better manage today’s sales funnel. But how? According to digital marketing strategist, Sujan Patel, there are three levels of marketing alignment: The Emotional Level: Your Sales and Marketing teams should be working cohesively together and supporting each other. They should not be working at cross-purposes. The Process Level: There need to be clear, measurable, sustainable, and repeatable processes in place to ensure that everyone within both the marketing and sales teams is pulling in the same direction and working in the same way. The Feedback Loop Level: Marketing doesn’t always produce awesome leads. Sometimes they might suck. Nobody’s perfect. That’s why sales need to communicate back to marketing so there is a feedback loop between the two teams to either encourage good leads or stop wasting company resources on bad ones. An effective partnership between sales and marketing is the #1 success factor attributed to achieving revenue goals. (Source: Heinz Marketing - Performance Management Report) So, how can we get sales and marketing to work better together? It starts with having a project plan in place. The first step is for sales and marketing to agree on what the ideal customer profile (I.D.C.) of a target customer should be. They need to agree on the characteristics that define the type of company (not the individual buyer or end-user) that will find the most value in their product or service offering. If done correctly, prospects that are aligned to the company’s IDC are most likely to become long-term customers who will give significant value back to the business in the form of possible subscription fees, upsells, and referrals. An easy way to identify the IDC of a company is to look at a list of their current best-performing customers and determine what attributes they have in common. The next step is for sales to explain to marketing the steps of the sales funnel, how it works and what marketing resources are needed to migrate the prospective customer through it. Too often, marketing is concerned with branding and outreach, and they do not allocate sufficient resources to the sales team to give them the resources and collateral they need to expedite their sales. Once sales and marketing are aligned regarding who the IDC of a company is and what marketing resources should be allocated to support the sales team, an organization can take its game up a level and begin to pursue account-based marketing (A.B.M.) opportunities. Account-based marketing is when marketing and sales teams work together in a focused approach to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers. When done correctly, marketing and sales teams meld their expertise to locate, engage with, and close deals with high-value accounts that offer a high ROI to their company. The primary components of account-based marketing include: Reaching the right accounts Engaging across marketing channels Determining effective metrics and measurements According to LinkedIn research, businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more effective at retaining customers, and drive 208% more revenue as a result of their marketing efforts. So, whether an organization is pursuing a traditional marketing approach or a more targeted account-based marketing strategy, it is essential for marketing to work more closely with sales in vigorous and meaningful ways. Today’s buyer is more knowledgeable and has access to more information about a prospective seller, their competition, and the marketplace than ever before. As a result, sales leaders need to demonstrate subject matter expertise in their area of commerce and leverage the content, tools, and resources that the marketing department can provide them to enhance their sales efforts. Although good salespeople will find a way to close business, having the support of a well-synchronized marketing team behind them will help accelerate the sales process, increase revenue, boost profitability and facilitate greater customer satisfaction.

Core ABM

Article | August 5, 2022

Intent data is an essential piece of the account-based marketing puzzle. It’s the type of data that can give B2B companies a competitive edge as they look to identify engaged, active prospects at prioritized accounts that show a clear pattern of interest in a product, service, or solution. As importantly, intent data can pinpoint signals in a buyer’s journey that lets you know what their next step might be, helping you target them with personalized, contextual messaging. There are a couple of flavors of intent data, but in this case, third-party intent data is the focus. Third-party intent data originates from external sources and may include many potential online interactions that have occurred away from your website and your company’s interactions. Website visits at competitor sites, webinar attendance, downloads, product reviews, social media interactions, and online subscriptions to publications in your industry or sector are fair game for third-party intent data insights. Like an intricate spider web woven from numerous data points, third-party intent data offers a view of online behavior for potential prospects as they traverse their buying journey.

Article | April 13, 2020

Account-based marketing (ABM) is becoming more popular as companies begin to realize that traditional funnel marketing does not produce the same results it used to in the B2B space. ABM gives the ability to personalize sales and marketing outreach on the account level, and technology helps us do it at scale. In this article, we uncover the best tactics you can implement in your ABM strategy to personalize your outreach for marketing, sales & service.