Nowadays, the purpose of an email isn’t just to promote your brand and what you have to offer. Instead, it provides subscribers and customers with a personalized and relevant experience that nurtures potential customers.
In other words, email is all about delivering value to your subscribers. So, although email personalization sends the most relevant emails to your subscribers at the right time, account-based marketing (ABM) centers on targeting a relevant Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) in marketing your brand.
Moreover, email is one of your arsenal’s most powerful marketing tools. Thus, integrating personalized emails with an ABM strategy can enhance engagement and get your desired results.
What is ABM, and why should you use it?
ABM is a strategic marketing approach that can be used in sales and marketing.
With ABM:
Key business accounts are marketed to individually.
High-value accounts are identified, with critical stakeholders identified and targeted. Specific marketing strategies are also done via different channels to match a particular need or persona.
There’s a forced alignment between sales and marketing. At the account level, personalization needs two departments to sync based on account-specific messaging.
Account based marketing campaigns focus on creating highly targeted and customized campaigns tailored to the needs of every individual account and their decision makers. Once you align email marketing with ABM, you can start seeing better results since email is still one of the most important channels to reach decision-makers.
Moreover, according to a Forrester survey, 56% of marketers strongly agree that personalized content is vital to ABM’s success. Moreover, approximately 95% of B2B companies will go for a provider that gives them plenty of content, helping them throughout every stage of the buying process. Thus, the content that you create must be ABM-friendly.
Using ABM in your email campaigns lets you understand the priorities and needs of your target accounts while adding value to their business at the same time.
Benefits of incorporating email personalization in your ABM strategy
Now that we’ve walked you through the basics, here are the advantages of integrating email personalization into your ABM strategy:
Targeted approach
An ABM campaign usually targets a specific account group that shares the same business needs, pain points, and demographics. Thus, instead of marketing to a large group, you’re trimming it down to a specific list of prospects, and doing so lets you personalize email campaigns for B2B businesses.
To correctly identify target accounts, you need a clear idea of what types of customers you need for your business. Make sure that you list the most relevant target accounts, and then study each one of them. Make sure these accounts are meaningful enough for your business to go after individually.
Know who are the key decision-makers in the organization or buying center, and then come up with an omnichannel strategy on how you can approach them.
Improved ROI and a quicker sales cycle
You need to craft relevant and personalized email content that will resonate well with your clients ─ specifically addressing their pain points. When done well, it’s more likely that they’ll buy your products and services.
Moreover, companies investing in email marketing have a high chance of getting higher ROIs. By tapping into ABM strategies on top of this, you can achieve promising results.
B2B sales can have incredibly long cycles and selling needs a lot of convincing of various stakeholders in your target accounts. Therefore, regular communication with personalized and relevant emails will force prospects to consider issues regularly and your business as potential sales. This means quicker conversions into a closed deal and a higher ROI.
Accelerate the buyer’s journey
Having highly personalized content in your emails increases the chance of conversions.
When your target accounts get content that speaks to them directly, addressing the challenges they face, they’re more likely to go with your products and services. In the same way, having highly-personalized landing pages that convert are also important.
When users get the right solutions to their problems, they’ll advance much quicker in the buyer’s journey.
Build better relationships with customers
ABM is about creating high-quality customer relationships. Everything you do, from how you engage with clients and do email marketing, plays a crucial role in creating customer experiences that allow you to develop better relationships.
However, most businesses fail to do this. That’s because many organizations have difficulty understanding the needs of prospects and clients.
Fortunately, by integrating email personalization with ABM, you can quickly turn things around. This will allow you to send highly targeted and personalized emails to clients.
Better qualitative data
ABM allows you to send relevant content that focuses on quality instead of quantity. There is less data that needs to be tracked but means measuring metrics and performance for ABM campaigns is simpler than regular ones. Just pay close attention to the qualitative feedback you're getting from customers. Start a dialogue instead of just shooting message into the void.
One-to-one personalization fully influences how the email is received. People are more likely to respond to a well-personalized email. This allows you to hone your approach constantly with other target accounts that have similar painds.
Provide a personalized experience
Personalization is also a helpful practice when connecting with your customers. Often, this goes beyond the standard personalization tactics like using someone’s first name.
Instead, it would help if you tapped into behavioral insights to provide customers with highly customized experiences. You can also utilize the purchasing history, browsing behavior and reading habits, and social profile of your clients.
Then, see what they prefer or what content they’re most likely tempted to read in the future. This way, you can create content on things that may be interesting to them. In the same way, you’ll also have a much more solid understanding of converting them into paying customers in the long run.
Moreover, because the target group of ABM is well-segmented, you can create email content that’s more relevant to them even if you're sending them all the same email. Highly personalized emails can significantly enhance your click-through rates and conversions.
Aligned sales and marketing
ABM needs almost an equal contribution between marketing and sales. Thus, you might have to target particular accounts, engage with them, and generate revenues.
Your marketing team needs to work hand in hand with your sales team to make the campaign more successful. It's usually your sales team that have the best insight into how a particular account is doing in any given moment. Therefore an email-based ABM campaign can align your sales and marketing better since email is also once of the main tools sales uses for customer communications.
Over to you
You need to know regarding ABM and email personalization is the amount of time that goes into crafting personalized strategies. Researching the right accounts to target and the right content and communication that works well takes a lot of work. However, it’s the key to a successful ABM strategy for any B2B company.
ABM, when combined with email personalization, can be a powerful tool that you can use in your arsenal to help you succeed. Using this deadly combination of email campaigns allows you to stay focused, be on the right track to your business goals, and get optimal results.
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