Todd Forsyth, Chief Marketing Officer of Veritas Technologies and former SVP of Digital Marketing at Dell, put it best when he said, “To focus on the customer and deliver a personalised experience, you have to harness all aspects of marketing collectively in a unified approach.” While Forsyth wasn’t referring to account-based marketing specifically, his quote is more than applicable for anyone running—or considering running—an ABM campaign.
Longer sales cycles and higher value opportunities come with expectations. These customers expect your company, or whichever provider they’re considering, to put in the time and effort. If they’re going to spend their precious dollars on your product or service, they want to be encounter “humanised” experiences. By itself, personalisation is appreciated and noticed by your customer or audience, but when it’s utilised in an omnichannel, holistic manner, it’s a powerful force that can make or break a potential conversion.
While most ABM campaigns benefit significantly from personalised experiences, it’s no easy feat to achieve. According to Hubspot, the common challenge faced by B2B marketers running an ABM campaign is “delivering a personalised experience.” Personalisation requires time, manpower, and resources (which, in this day and age, are usually finite). But there are a few simple, straightforward ways you can incorporate personalisation into your customer journey.
Here are four personalisation tactics B2B marketing and sales teams can use in an ABM campaign.
1. Content Marketing Personalisation
Content marketing personalisation starts with the basics: You must know whom you’re targeting and what stage of the sales funnel they’re in. Different accounts will require different content. Many account-based marketers use intent data to gain insight into account and funnel position—but personalisation should expand into the exact type of content you’re delivering. Is it an awareness stage blog post or a detailed product comparison?
This tactic also applies to current versus new customers. Current accounts won’t need general information on what you currently offer—but they might be interested in a white paper discussing how your company’s newest tool can be weaved into their current strategy or tech stack.
2. Email List Segmentation
Email personalisation is a small but mighty way to make an impression with your target account list. Whether you begin with geographical or industry segmentation or you have it filtered down to organization, segmentation will only increase your chances of success. According to statistics pulled together from Instapage, personalised emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, and 82% of marketers report an increase in open rates when the send is personalised. Customise the subject line, pre-header text, welcome text, or even the CTA.’
3. Custom Landing Pages
A custom landing page is a true team effort—involving everyone from your designers to your copywriters to your developers. You’ll need custom copy and imagery and layouts designed for the specific accounts. But the work is worth it. In fact, 79% of consumers say they’d only likely engage if the webpage content or messaging has been personalised for their unique experience (Instapage).
You’ll also need additional tools—like Clearbit Reveal and Hubspot—to know which companies are visiting your site and to have the ability to serve them a specific landing page. Once the tools are implemented, however, you’ll be able to deliver customised content whenever the interested account reaches your site—and reap the reward.
4. Chat Marketing Customisation
Finally, the feature on everyone’s mind these days is chat marketing or chat messaging. According to MobileMonkey, B2B chat users are seeing a 25% reduction in customer service costs and 75% more conversions. Chat messaging is a B2B marketer’s dream: It can be personalised for one-to-one interactions and eventually scaled. Depending on the amount of site traffic your company sees each day, personalised chat can also be automated while carrying forward the personalisation factor (you can integrate Clearbit Reveal with chat tools like Drift to add custom messaging or greetings).