Why Account-Based Customer Marketing Matters
Account-based marketing is an incredibly effective way to turn your target accounts into customers, but the benefits don’t end there. ABM not only helps generate and accelerate pipeline, but it also facilitates customer retention and can increase revenue from your customer base.
Consider the oft-quoted statistic from Gartner Group that 80% of a business’ profits over time come from just 20% of their customers. If you’re putting all your resources into acquiring new customers rather than building mutually beneficial relationships with your current clients, you’re missing out on a ton of potential revenue.
When you take an account-based approach to business, it becomes clear that satisfied customers are not just clients; they’re also your best advocates, as well as prospects for upselling, cross-selling, renewals, and expansion.
When you’re doing customer marketing, it’s important to remember that your clients are not just the end users you engage with on a regular basis. You need to build business relationships with other key stakeholders at each customer account, too — and that’s where ABM comes in.
Key Channels for B2B Customer Marketing
While emails and phone calls are a great way to reach your customers, you should consider additional channels when you’re doing account-based customer marketing to expand your reach to more decision-makers at your customer accounts. Think about using:
- Marketing emails
- Customer success emails
- In-app messaging (for SaaS companies)
- Account-based website personalization
- Custom content
- Account-based digital ads
- Customer events
- Retargeting
- Product webinars
- How-to webinars
- Direct mail
You have so many opportunities to engage and delight your customers using a multichannel approach. Don’t rely solely on email for your customer marketing campaigns!
Customer Marketing ABM Campaign Templates
You can employ two account-based strategies for customer marketing: upsell/cross-sell campaigns and land and expand campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at these ABM strategies, as well as editable templates that will help you plan and execute campaigns for each.
1. Upsell/Cross-Sell
The goal of cross-selling and upselling is to increase contract values of your current customer base. Cross-selling refers to selling customers another product or service in addition to the one they currently use, while upselling refers to selling a higher tier of the same solution to a current customer.
Tip: To execute a successful upsell campaign, identify successful customer accounts that pay for the highest tier of your solution. What characteristics do they share? Then, go into your CRM and pull a list customer accounts that match these characteristics and haven’t yet upgraded.
While upselling and cross-selling can absolutely happen at the customer’s request, account-based marketing is really about finding the specific accounts that could benefit from it. This campaign strategy requires close collaboration between your marketing, sales, and customer success teams as you identify which accounts are good candidates for additional offerings and engage them in a personalized way. After all, you don’t want to inundate customers with sales offers that aren’t relevant to them.
2. Land & Expand
Selling to large mid-market and enterprise accounts can be tricky, especially when they’re divided into smaller divisions or subsidiaries that operate independently and often have different points of contact. This is where you’ll want to “land and expand.”
If you’ve done business with one division of a large company and are hoping to expand into others, you can use account-based marketing to reach key stakeholders and your existing relationship with their colleagues to build trust. If possible, leverage testimonials or a case study from your target buyers’ colleagues along with hyper-personalized content created just for them.
Targeted display advertising is a key channel to promote your custom content for land and expand campaigns. You can use technology like Terminus to present digital ads to those target divisions’ key decision-makers.
As you expand your relationship with different departments or divisions within an enterprise company, you will evolve from being just another vendor to being an invaluable partner that’s embedded in the DNA of their business.
Get More Worksheets & How-To Guides
Get more resources for planning, orchestrating, and measuring your ABM campaigns in our e-book the Blueprint to Account-Based Marketing Campaigns. Download it now to access worksheets, real-world campaign examples, and tips for ABM success.
