An overwhelming majority of people who run email mass marketing campaigns struggle to get potential clients to even open their messages. This fact is the reason that so many people have suggested that inbox marketing is a dying art. Savvy small business promoters are turning to account-based marketing campaigns to turn things around, however, and they might stand to make larger profits than most people ever have in their respective space.
Account-based campaigns focus exclusively on the best-fitting accounts for any given type of product or service. Most of these emphasize B2B sales as opposed to anything involving end-users. Considering that an average inbox has some 200 messages stashed inside, it makes sense to forgo the consumer market for something more stable.
Those who want to engage in this kind of campaign need some way to figure out which accounts are the right ones, and this need has led to some unusual techniques.
Segmenting a List Based on Perceived Needs
In spite of the fact that there’s quite a bit of advice out there telling small business leaders how to generate new leads, many B2B sellers actually have more potential leads than they could reasonably market to. Those who want to start a new account-based marketing campaign would first have to throw out all of the dated entries on their existing list that are no longer active.
Particularly progressive business leaders have adopted AI-based tools that handle this automatically. Once they’re sure that all of the contact details on their list are updated, marketers can then start to select the highest value accounts from their list.
Rather than focusing on specific industries, this kind of approach rates accounts purely by their overall value. Once it’s obvious which accounts are worth the most, it shouldn’t be difficult to develop a campaign that’s custom-tailored to each one.
Humanizing the Marketing Process
Marketing isn’t normally thought of as a very human process, especially when you’re trying to market to a larger organization. However, those specialists who engage in this kind of marketing actively create content that’s specific to each individual account they market. Admittedly, this isn’t particularly scalable, especially for those who have to reach several different groups all at the same time. Most people who run email marketing campaigns tend to write a single letter that can be merged with the relevant contact details for potentially thousands of different people. This usually doesn’t take much effort to deploy even if a campaign has to put out new messages regularly.
Nevertheless, a focused campaign that requires the generation of specialized content makes sense when dealing with sales opportunities that could continue to grow for some period of time. Some estimates have suggested that the overall ROI for this kind of focused inbox marketing campaign could be as high as 4,400 percent if not more.
Once a marketing specialist has made a connection with a potential client, however, it’s important to keep said contact engaged across every potential channel.
Engaging Leads Across Multiple Channels
Those who want to try an account-based marketing campaign more than likely have a specific product or message to get out to their leads. Coordinating this message across every channel is vital to keep potential buyers engaged. Professional account-based marketers normally do their best to align the activities of both their marketing and sales teams together to put the biggest punch into anything they send people. High-quality content creation is still the most important part of this step, since you want to make sure that all materials being sent out to potential buyers are unified and tailored to the business segment in question.
Different channels are going to be optimal choices for different roles or industries that a campaign is reaching out to. Considering the sharp differences in opt-in rules in various regions, those attempting to take a campaign like this on an international level will even need to consider legislative regulations. This is especially true of those who are selling products across state or national boundaries.
Though this might seem like quite a bit of work, a number of small business marketing experts seem to agree that account-based marketing campaigns can be extremely profitable when carried out the right way.