Live Email Personalization: The Secret Weapon in Your ABM Strategy

This is a guest post from Shefa Weinstein, VP Product at PowerInbox.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is the hottest trend in B2B strategy right now, and judging by the number of sessions and floor conversations devoted to ABM at virtually every B2B marketing event this year, B2B marketers are feeling the pressure to get with the ABM program. In short: everyone is doing it, and if you’re not, you risk getting buried by your competitors.

While the approach itself isn’t new, it’s only been within the past few years that technologies have evolved to make ABM feasible at scale. But, like many other innovations, the fact that everyone is doing it creates a new problem: how to differentiate and stand out from the crowd?

Live-on-the-open email personalization that delivers relevant, contextual content in real time could be your new secret weapon that gives your ABM campaigns a substantial edge, allowing you to more accurately target specific individuals with exactly the messages they want to hear, with almost no additional effort.

A Perfect Match

ABM, by its very definition, demands the ability to target key individuals inside each prospective customer account with precise messages aimed at addressing their specific needs and challenges. Treating each account as a market of one enables you to develop deeper relationships with key individuals at key accounts, ultimately leading to more focused, strategic sales and higher revenue. And, it works. According to ITSMA, ABM generates the highest ROI of any other approach, enabling marketers to “zero in on the essential needs of their most important clients.”

In fact, contextual, real-time email personalization does exactly that—it targets each individual recipient with such precisely customized, highly relevant messages that it makes each email feel as though it was written specifically for them. It’s an ideal, automated solution to enabling B2B ABM at scale through email, the most powerful and effective marketing channel.

A Powerful Combination for Real-Time Relevancy

To demonstrate the potential of this powerful combination, here are 5 ways live-on-the-open email personalization can amplify your ABM strategy:

1. Hyper-personalization: To be effective, many ABM outreach tactics and tools rely on job titles for targeting, but this doesn’t always accurately reflect the individual’s role or pain points that your solution could address. Live-on-the-open email personalization leverages a combination of first- and third-party data to hyper-target and deliver the most relevant content to each individual, regardless of title. One example: location-based targeting that changes each time the email is opened. You could invite prospective clients to check out your latest webinar—or to make a personal visit to your office when their location data shows they’re in town—both within the same email, using an invitation that changes dynamically based on location.
2. Leverage existing content: You probably have plenty of content that’s already targeted to specific personas, which would be extremely useful for an ABM campaign. By adding live-on-the-open personalization to your emails, you can deliver a carousel of the most relevant materials to each recipient, including links to whitepapers, webinar invitations and muted play-on-the-open video that will grab their attention.
3. Measurement: To measure results, ABM requires more specific metrics than just clicks and opens. Success is measured in terms of pipeline growth, revenue generated, etc. Real-time, contextual personalization lets you measure email engagement throughout the funnel, to give you a better sense of what’s working incrementally at various points, allowing you to make changes and fine tune messages and content to drive better results.
4. Dig deeper: ABM depends on a deep understanding of key individuals and strong relationship building. Contextual email personalization is responsive, allowing you to gather and refine data on your customers based on how they respond to various content, to understand what piques their interests. You can even ask them specific questions with a survey or poll, to which they can respond in a single click, inside the email.
5. Augment lead scoring data: This newfound engagement data also allows you to refine lead scoring, to get a more accurate picture of which leads have the most potential and are most likely to convert, which enables you to prioritize and focus your efforts and time.

While there’s certainly no shortage of tools on the market that promise to enhance your ABM efforts, adding live-on-the-open email personalization is a simple and effective way to supplement your email outreach program.

And, because it’s fast and easy to implement, it does the heavy lifting for you, delivering hyper-personalized, ultra-relevant content to each key individual with practically no effort on your part. That allows you to spend more time talking with prospects and presenting solutions, and less time trying to craft the right email to get their attention.

Register below to attend Shefa’s webinar in the upcoming Account-Based Marketing & the Era of Targeting Summit.