We just finished putting together this year’s Terminus September Issue (a collection of killer digital campaigns from 2020), and I can’t stop thinking about this one banner that we featured from our customer Chatmeter. It’s an email signature banner designed to welcome a new customer to the “family”, and it literally had a burst of virtual confetti on it.
Come on–what better use for confetti is there than celebrating and welcoming a new customer? That’s how you kick off a lasting relationship! But beyond the initial burst of confetti, there’s so much opportunity to delight and win with customers long after you’ve gotten their initial signature, and every little effort adds up to help you create a relationship good enough that they’ll not only continually want to do business with you, but they’ll want to grow and expand their relationship with you. And that’s exactly why we’re going to continue our full funnel account-based plays series with the customer expansion play!
Build On A Strong Foundation and Target Current Customers for Expansion
When to Consider This Play
ABM isn’t just for new and future customers. In fact, true full-funnel account-based marketing means that you are creating plays and targeting strategies for current customers, too. (After all, you’ve already got their trust and have established a relationship–so who better to continue growing with?) Have a new product feature or service offering to share? How about a newly discovered pain point your product or team can help with? Or perhaps a key renewal date is coming up? These are all forcing functions your team can use as opportunities to market to your customers and expand your contract with them.
Here’s How We’ve Done It
Shortly after the acquisition of Sigstr, we wanted to target the current customer list of each organization and introduce them to a whole new set of platform functionality. For the list of Sigstr customers, we promoted Terminus product features. And for Terminus customers, Sigstr product features.
As listed out below, we used key data points like product usage, renewal date, and current features/services included in the customer’s current contract. Then, we launched unified, personalized messages across multiple channels and orchestrated appropriate follow-up for the CS team based on engagement. Our ads for this play were all consistent with our “pump up the volume” theme. They led customers to a landing page for a scheduled demo and then a customer-only webinar.
Data Available to You in Terminus:
The Terminus platform works with your CRM to bring additional firmographics and intent to your accounts so that you can easily filter based on relevant criteria. This will help determine which customer accounts you want to focus on first.
Here’s what that includes natively:
- Bombora intent
- Relationship score (employee email and calendar patterns)
- Web engagement data
You can also use any field object you might also have as part of your CRM, which might include:
- Renewal date
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Product usage
- Any other custom field
How the TEAM Framework Can Help Guide You
Target:
With expansion opportunities, we’re obviously talking about current customers. So you already have a starting point or list of accounts to focus on. But there are many more ways to segment and prioritize beyond just “all current customers”. Think about company size, industries, verticals, or even new personas. If your product offers multiple packages or product features, pay attention to utilization and which parts of your product they may not be using yet.
Use your CSM team to your advantage here. Learn about the primary users of each account, the original buying committee, any new decision makers, and the current trajectory of their business. Leveraging the intent and engagement measurement tools in your tech stack can also help. After getting historical knowledge from your CSM teammates, start your own research. Look through their website, who they’re hiring for, or what campaigns they’re currently running. The more time you spend in this stage, the better prepared you will be to personalize the content and use specific messaging for each subset of customers.
Engage:
Now it’s time to create and orchestrate your plays across every relevant channel. To start, we recommend account-based display advertising, LinkedIn, and one-to-one email. Unified, personalized messages across all channels compound their impact. Use consistent imagery or branding with the same overall message. Effectively showcase the new service or feature you want the customer to know about, and use the ad as a call-to-action for the next step. A webinar, meeting with their CSM, or weekly demo with other customers are all good options.
Activate:
Set up an engagement spike and account insights within your CRM to let your CSM team know when and who from the customer account is clicking on the ad, signing up for the demo, or registering for the webinar. With Account Insights from Terminus, your CSM will be able to see both known and unknown contacts engaging with your campaigns. This helps show the potential size of the buying committee and new departments or teams within that particular organization.
Measure:
After your Sales or CS team appropriately follows up with a call, email, or meeting based on how the customer engaged, it’s time to evaluate a few KPIs that will determine the success of this campaign. Your list can be shorter or longer than this depending on what’s most important to your organization, but here are a few ideas that can guide you:
- Number of customer account and/or percentage of customer base that engaged
- New meetings or demos booked
- Total webinar registrations
- New upsell opportunities generated
- New users or services added from upsell opportunities
- Revenue generated from upsell opportunities
ABM is all about personalization, and who better to get personal with than your customers who you’ve already formed relationships with? We’re loving sharing some of our own personal ABM plays with you! Keep an eye on the blog and our social channels to see more tactical tips in action, and share your own success stories with us!
