For many marketers getting started with ABM, email seems like an obvious answer to driving engagement. It’s easy to personalize, easy to measure and scale, and when done really well, it can open the door to sales conversations.
But for all its benefits, email marketing has limitations. With an estimated 320 billion emails sent each day, there’s no guarantee that someone will open yours, let alone read them.
The only way to fight this channel fatigue is to stop treating email like your only means to engage—and to start running multichannel programs that meet your target customers in all the places they hang out.
Why engagement plays should go beyond email
We can’t deny the personalization potential of email, but some marketers don’t have enough meaningful information to work with.
This typically shows up as a lack of segmentation, a reliance on merge fields, and zero consideration for the recipient’s role within their organization. In situations like these, any attempt to nurture an email list becomes more “batch and blast” than account-based.
Digital ABM helps marketers fill in the blanks by bringing their own data to the table.
When you can connect your CRM or MAP email list with things like display ads, e-gifting, and chat, you can create cohesive and contextualized messaging tailored to each persona or contact within a target account.
This is a pretty big deal. It means marketers can reach the entire buying committee across channels with persona-specific messages that also speak to their place in the sales funnel.
In other words, you can serve the right message to the right person at the right time. And the better the engagement, the faster the deal cycle.
The play: Increasing engagement with multichannel campaigns
Driving deeper engagement comes down to timing and relevancy.
To move away from one-size-fits-all messaging, you’ll need to identify your segments, map your personas, and speak to their individual stage in the sales cycle.
Here’s a breakdown of the play:
- Problem: You have some target account contacts in your CRM that you’ve been emailing, but you need to drive deeper engagement to move them through the funnel.
- Goal: Turn unengaged accounts into engaged accounts and contacts.
- Audience: Unengaged accounts and contacts.
- Tactic: Run personalized, sales stage-based ads toward contacts and supplement with sales outreach or direct mail/gifting.
- KPIs: Unique visitors, engaged visitors, total page views, conversions
“At Enplug, this is exactly what we needed to do to build engagement for HR and Operations personas across Manufacturing, Oil & Energy, and Utility industries. Once we identified their segments, we launched highly-personalized targeted ads to ungated content and demo requests.
By integrating HubSpot and RollWorks, we saw 4x as many accounts on our target list move from aware to engaged in just two months.”
— Staisey Divorski, VP Marketing, Enplug
The finish: Checking your work
Successful engagement plays depend on a mix of integrated tools, relevant messaging, and a plan for sales outreach. Double-check your work with the following checkpoints:
- Did you set up integrations between marketing automation, advertising, direct mail, email banners, etc.?
- Did you create clear persona mapping for the entire buying committee for personalized messaging based on role, industry, sales stage, etc.?
- Did you align with sales on what warrants follow-up and how you’ll tackle outreach?
