What Are Email Best Practices for ABM?

Account-based marketing (ABM) has become an increasingly critical tactic to employ in the age of personalized marketing. Your recipient is not going to respond to an email that is clearly generic and could apply to anyone. They want to hear how you are going to help their specific need or address their desires. 

Knowing you need to do this and actually achieving it as your email marketing strategy are two different things. Before developing and creating these more personalized email campaigns, you will need to understand your audience, including the potentially diverse segments. Going beyond name and address, personalization begins when you have other insights about their age, income, purchase patterns, communication preferences, and interests.   

From there, you can start to segment your database and plan an ABM email strategy. When you are ready to begin, here are some ABM email marketing best practices to incorporate to optimize delivery, open response, and action rates:

Concentrate on the delivery details 

The basics of delivery underpin any successful email campaign. Regularly focus on verifying email addresses. Some emails will bounce or change, so it’s important to do due diligence in removing bounced emails and updating existing ones as you receive notifications. 

Create a compelling subject line

Think of your subject line as the first impression. This is what your recipients will see when they open their email and scan through the list of new emails. The subject line has to catch their eye and convince them to open it. Don’t make it any longer than 45 characters and focus on a brief message tied to solving their pain point rather than on a selling point. 

Add personalization features to the email body

Show your recipients that the emails are about them personally. Start with the introduction by using their name instead of a generic greeting. Along with that, have a few lines that address that you know more about them and their unique issues or problems. If you have worked with them before, this is also the time to reference a previous transaction or a meeting. 

Be thoughtful about graphics

Using images can add visual interest, but certain email servers may block image-heavy emails, throwing your hard work away in your recipients’ spam folder. Don’t let your email get lost. Instead, balance those graphics with text. Also, be sure to add a text-based version of your email, as this might help get your email to its intended target.  

Design with mobility in mind

While you may not know how your recipient reads your email, there is a good chance that they will use their smartphone or tablet to do so. Test your email to see how it looks on a laptop and desktop as well as a mobile device. Most email templates are designed with various screen sizes in mind. 

Give them a reason to contact you

If you do all of the above and then fail to provide the recipient with a clear call to action, all that effort was for nothing. After all, the campaign was created with the intent to accomplish something. 

Is it downloading a new white paper? It is to drive them to an event landing page? Is it to get them to learn more about a new service or product?  Whatever the reason, give them directions on what they should do and the means to easily complete that call to action. 

Use AI-enabled marketing automation tools 

Smart marketing automation tools can go a long way to improving your ABM email campaigns. From email tracking plug-ins that tell you who opened the message from your distribution list to email scheduling optimization to identify the best time to send it to analytics tools that give you the engagement rates, you will be able to identify ways to get the most from your efforts. 

See it as one of many tools 

Think of email marketing as one tier in your ABM outreach strategy. Audiences are becoming more fragmented in terms of the way they consume media and the channels they engage with, making it more challenging for marketers. 

As a result, you will need to combine email marketing with other ABM-focused channels, such as direct mail, phone, video, and social media. Doing so will help reinforce a consistent message across channels and improve the likelihood that your personalized messaging is reaching and influencing your targets. 

                                                                                                 

For more information about ABM, please check out:

• Power in Precision with Account-Based Marketing
• Don’t Give in to Account-Based Confusion
• Oracle Marketing ABM Resource Hub

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