Engagement is the bread and butter of account-based marketing. Not only that, measuring the touches happening with an account is vital for assessing the effectiveness of your strategy. But it’s not always easy. Teams are constantly trying to break through the noise so the right people engage with their brand. And it’s not always successful, as passively acquired attention is a gold mine for marketers nowadays.
That’s why teams are considering a new channel for ABM engagement. Employee email presents a huge opportunity for ABM marketers. They can now add personalized, but scalable, content resources into the billions of organic conversations that are already happening. How? Through each employee’s email signature.
Email signature marketing makes a dent in the “Engage” section of an ABM operation. Most interactions with targeted accounts will be in either Gmail or Outlook. Now each exchange from your email domain can have powerful banners that are relevant and personalized.
Sigstr ABM functionality
Sigstr is able to identify the sender and recipient of each email, allowing marketers to execute crazy cool targeted campaigns. Teams can import lists directly into the application or connect to the smart and static lists in other platforms. Sigstr provides simple and reliable targeting so the right content is delivered to the right audience every time.
Audiences can vary from industries and verticals all the way down to specific accounts and contacts. Recipient lists can even be built by triggers from your CRM or marketing automation platforms. This includes opportunity stage.
There’s a lot you can do with this functionality and some might be asking, “Where do I even start?” That’s why we’re showing you how Sigstr uses Sigstr for ABM targeting! The highlight reel above and full list below shares ideas and inspiration for your own ABM email signature marketing campaigns.
Industry or vertical
We promote our Pacers case study with the “Sports Franchises” list we built within Sigstr. This includes the Miami Heat, Chicago Cubs, or Detroit Red Wings (you get the picture). When someone from Sigstr emails these domains, recipients will see this relevant resource that highlights what’s most important to them.
We use the same playbook for nonprofits. Email signature marketing is a great use case for recruiting volunteers and asking for donations, so we wrote a blog post about it and use this banner to promote it. This time, we built our target list via a Salesforce campaign, which then we synced to our Sigstr account.
Rinse and repeat for digital marketing agencies. We have a blog that highlights a few of our agency customers and use this banner to promote the post to our list of other digital marketing agencies.
Net Health is a rockstar customer and best-in-class example of a healthcare technology company using email signature marketing. We want to make sure other healthcare tech brands see their story, so this case study shows up when we email a domain included in our “Healthcare Tech” target list.
Sales stage
Top tier accounts (with three engagements or less) will see this banner introducing Sigstr in a personalized way while inviting the email recipient to learn more.
Other top tier accounts (with four or more engagements) receive this message as the relationship continues to build. At this point, we know their business a little bit better and can map certain features of Sigstr with their pain points or goals.
Once a prospect has seen a demo, our Account Executive will send a follow-up email recapping the call and laying out next steps. And within that email, the recipient will see this message. To make this happen on our side of things, the Account Executive just adds the contact to a HubSpot workflow (via the contact view of Salesforce). The recipient will then be removed from the workflow ten days later and see a new campaign banner when the next email is sent.
Similar to the demo stage, contacts will see this banner if they are a part of an opportunity that is currently in the “Technical Evaluation” stage. At this point their IT team is involved so we want to show them how serious we are about security.
If a qualified prospect “goes dark” or we haven’t engaged them with in a while, they will see this campaign. It leads them to a personalized microsite that shows them how email signature marketing can bring value to their business (based on their top priorities and goals).
Finally, we want to show our customers how much we appreciate them choosing Sigstr. Especially new customers! Emails to those contacts tied to an opportunity in the “Closed/Won” stage will see this banner. We want them to know they’re not just starting another vendor partnership. They’re jumping into a community of like-minded marketers who are constantly sharing ideas and stories about this new owned marketing channel. It’s a great way for new customers to learn about other current customers and read about Sigstr’s core values.
Current customers
In addition to in-app messages and customer emails, the Sigstr Support twitter is a great way to stay up-to-date with new Sigstr features and releases. All customers may not know this, so we target them with this campaign to get the word out.
Whenever we publish new release notes or write about a new feature, we use a banner like this to share it with our “Current Customers” recipient list.
We also share with customers which specific features they can expect in the coming months or quarters during “Roadmap” webinars like this one.
G2 Crowd is a great way to gather customer feedback and showcase positive reviews with current prospects. We use email signature marketing to help build up our collection of reviews and ratings.
Tech stack
Prospects who use HubSpot are added to the “Tech Stack: HubSpot” recipient list so they can see this message. It leads them to a resource page that shows all of the cool ways you can use HubSpot + Sigstr together for inbound greatness.
We teamed up with the fine folks at Uberflip and Terminus to show our audience how you can use these three platforms together for ABM success. The webinar registration and recording targets our “Tech Stack: Uberflip” and “Tech Stack: Terminus” lists.
See a theme here yet? We use our “Tech Stack: Salesforce” recipient list with campaigns like this one.
And finally, our “Tech Stack: Marketo” list pairs up Marketo-specific content, like this press release.
Event, conference, or trade show
We launched this campaign and assigned it to a list of contacts attending this year’s HubSpot partner day. If you have a good idea of who will be attending a specific event, this is a great way to schedule a meeting before it even starts.
This strategy also works for large conferences. We hosted a happy hour to catch up with Sigstr customers and friends during SaaStr. We got the word out to those within our network who were planning on being in San Francisco.
