The Inbox Opportunity for Account Based Marketing

Your email campaigns may be an extremely beneficial place to apply an active Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy because you have the opportunity to directly reach stakeholders with the right content.

Capitalizing on that opportunity requires adjusting your email campaigns to take advantage of best practices designed to increase open rates, click-throughs, and successful targeting. We’ve put together a few of these top Do’s and Don’ts to help you unleash the opportunities that ABM opens up for B2B email marketing.

3 Things Your Emails Should Be Doing

Do: A/B Test with Metrics

ABM succeeds when you know what works best. This requires tracking campaigns to see how well you’re doing, paying attention to not only tests within messages but compared to previous campaigns. Because ABM looks at a prospect as an entire ecosystem, the key is to look at A/B tests at both individual levels of the funnel and as an overall effort targeting that whole organization.

Email metrics are a perfect opportunity for you to start building ABM-specific actionable data.

Do: Match Funnels and Target Titles to Read Rates

Read rate is the top metric that deserves its own consideration. Learn the rate for each email campaign component, from indoctrination campaigns to up-sells. This can show you where your marketing needs to adjust by highlighting areas where you may be sending the wrong content to the wrong job title, or need to introduce more trust-building content before an organization is ready for your lead magnet.

Do: Keep Subject Lines Focused on Problem Solving

Much of today’s B2B email marketing advice focuses on metrics, pixels, emotional language, and other tools that give you a checklist for compelling content. However, those quickly lose sight of the reason behind your email.

You want to provide a service or solution, making your target’s day easier, more efficient, or more affordable. Relate that solution in the subject line and keep it relative to the organization so that you are building a reputation as helping the company as a whole, as well as the individual reading your email.

3 Big Don’ts for B2B Emails

Don’t: Ignore Mobile

Take a second to think about the targets in your funnel. How many of them are always at their PC and plenty of time to read your emails? If you’re like most of us, that’s little to none.

This email marketing study recap says 27.18% of all B2B emails are read on mobile devices, but that increases to 50% for marketing emails. If your clients are using Gmail to power their business emails, then they’re likely in the 75% of Gmail users who regularly access their accounts on mobile devices.

Other reports say that responsive design can increase overall email clicks by as much as 130%.

Don’t: Send Everything From the Same Account

ABM email campaigns are broad and reach many people in the food chain of your target organizations. Senders should reflect the status of the recipient, either coming from a peer or a higher up. Marketing and account managers are a great starting point, but you can reach more technical roles when emails come from one of your own engineers, for example.

Essentially, this is ABM personalization on a level that most customers won’t see as a marketing tactic.

Another must-have is an email from your C-Suite if your targets are C-Suite decision makers. Your marketing team can do the follow-up legwork to set a meeting between the two c-level executives, but matching the initial touchpoint to your target can help the message seem more serious, valuable, and respectful.

Don’t: Bury the Unsubscribe Button

Email marketing in the B2B space has always needed a balance between advertising your solutions and not angering potential customers. Poor prospecting can ruin your branding. It’s especially true in our social age where unwelcome interactions are more likely to be shared and posted online.

The good side of that coin is roughly 60% of B2B buyers will share a positive experience. If you’ve sent out a message that isn’t a good fit but did provide smart content and an easy way to say “No thanks,” then you raise the chances of improving your reputation and having a second chance at a future lead who still may be a brand advocate.

Getting Started Right Away

There are a lot of opportunities for ABM to guide successful email marketing. These are just the tip of the iceberg, if you’ll excuse the pun. The data that smart Account Based Marketing provides can quickly turn your email marketing efforts into a winning strategy.

There’s a great deal of data you can use to start testing, but why eat up time ruling out metrics that are already proven not to help? Together, we’ll get you there faster and make sure each campaign targets the right people at the right time.