Account Based Marketing – Page 2 – Practical Strategies for B2B Technology Companies

Challenge: A case study in paying prospects for a trial experience

Blog Note – this is an edited version of a longer write-up.

Summary:

Many companies rely on a free trial experience to drive prospect engagement. I had this very experience at with a company, a journey that took 18 months.

The objective was to drive the target buyer into a 14-day free trial (which, at the time, influenced more than 70 percent of closed-won business). Marketing’s goal was to dramatically increase the quantity of trials at the same conversion level while closely managing the cost of customer acquisition.

We experimented with a $25 Starbucks gift card offer for installing the trial as well as attending the daily demo. By tying the incentive to both the trial and demo, prospects would see the product capabilities and try it out for themselves in rapid succession in an attempt to drive that “a-ha moment” when the prospect clearly sees the value to them personally and to their company.

To evaluate impact of this offer, we broke this down in phases. First we tested it as a one time email offer to our database, then identified mechanisms to automate both the offer and card delivery in select channels like our integrated nurture process and finally expanded to an offer on our website to dramatically scale the offer. And after 18 months of great results, we eventually pulled the offer – and this is the story of that journey.

Evaluating Results

First, the team sent a one-off database email with a split test comparing a basic trial offer with no incentive to the offer of the Starbucks gift card, requiring both trial installation and daily demo. We measured impact on both click thru rate (CTR) and form completion rate. Email CTR increased by 3x (.9% to 2.7%). However, in order to qualify for the gift card, the prospect had to fill out two forms – the trial and the daily demo. When comparing the single trial landing page conversion rate with the rate of those completing both forms, the completion rate went from 68% for the trial alone to 42% for both forms. Digging deeper, the trial form completion rate was identical (68%) – so the subsequent demo registrations represented a net gain and therefore was viewed as a cost-effective promotion (and down funnel conversion rates remained unchanged). Net – 3x increase in CTR with the same trial landing page conversion rate with incremental increase in daily demo registrations. After 4-6 weeks, the down funnel conversion rates were comparable to non-incentivized trials.

With this proven one-time offer, the team evaluated ways to expand the reach of this offer. The decision was to run an A/B test of the trial incentive in our ongoing integrated email nurture. The trial was a middle of funnel (MOF) nurture offer to prospects who met quality scoring thresholds. Again, the results were positive. The CTR for the trial alone was 3.9% versus 10.6% for the Starbucks offer with similar landing page results above. However, now we had instrumented an automated delivery and fulfillment of this offer – so we dramatically increased trials while only rewarding for success events – namely participation in daily demo and trial campaigns that were highly correlated with closed-won business. But we only made this offer to qualified prospects who entered the funnel from a variety of other marketing programs. And with automated fulfillment, there was minimal additional labor required from the team. But could we do more?…

Next, the team examined if it was possible to further broaden the offer but still maintain high down-funnel conversion rates. At that time we implemented a website conversion optimization technology called BounceExchange (BX), which detects web visitors ready to abandon and raises an offer via a pop-over window. BX would make the Starbucks trial incentive even more broadly available to some/all website visitors. We added the Starbucks offer to BounceExchange with great results: the website trial CTR increased from 1.72% to 2.48%, a 44% conversion rate bump. With our growing website traffic, this had a tremendous impact on our trial conversions, driving over 4000 incremental trial conversions at a CPL of approximately one-tenth of paid search campaigns.

Remember that the offer was designed such that the $25 incentive would be delivered only if the prospect were to both download the trial and attend the daily demo. So the team felt really good about top of funnel results. Looking down funnel, for the next 12 months, we saw a consistent ~20% MQL to SAO conversion rate for these trial offers – consistent with non-incented trials. Finally, putting an ROI lens on this offer, it increased cost per opportunity by $125 ($25/.2) – staying within our cost-per-opportunity target.

Incentive EOL

Alas, the good times did not roll on forever. Over time, two developments led to our halting this offer. The first was an erosion of conversion rates, which happened gradually. We suspect that there may have been saturation of the offer with our target prospects. Second, we encountered fraudulent postings to this offer beyond our target audience. While we were able to respond quickly to limit potential expenses, the time required to monitor and correct these offers represented ongoing support by resources that could be focused elsewhere. So approximately 18 months after the start of this journey, we removed the offer.

Lesson Learned

Incentives to drive the right prospect behavior worked well for a while and supported scaling at a key time of company growth. Designing both the offer and automating fulfillment were key. However, as with many marketing campaigns, great programs have an end-of-life and should be constantly and closely monitored.

accountbasedmarketing

Challenge: Is ABM Right for My organization?

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is the rage. All the ‘cool marketers’ are doing this, new martec companies have been formed with ABM solutions, and other martec companies are repositioning their offerings as ABM. We all want new customer accounts and we also want more of our successful customers to grow and advocate on our behalf. But this doesn’t necessarily mean ABM is the right strategy for your organization. After spending significant time & effort into ABM, I thought it would be worthwhile to share high level thoughts on whether this makes sense for your organization.

According to Wikipedia,

“Account-based marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to business marketing in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one. Account based marketing is typically employed in enterprise level sales organizations.”

Put a different way, ABM is about aligning sales and marketing with the purpose of targeting a small set of highly valuable accounts with a customized approach. In my experience, this means between 20 and 200 customer accounts each with a deal or lifetime value of $100K+. In ABM, both marketing and sales dedicate a disproportionate share of time and budget to accounts that will pay the largest dividends. This makes sense economically – and a company can justify the added expense (hard and soft dollars) based on larger returns from these customers’ initial and subsequent purchases.

But I’m wary of articles describing ‘how to scale ABM’ because it’s difficult to differentiate large scale ABM from Target Account Marketing or Industry/Vertical Marketing. Let’s consider the differences between ABM and general best practices of persona and customer journey marketing. In well-formulated Target Account Marketing, customized content is delivered at scale via email, phone, web, social and postal. This content may be customized to persona, level, role, industry and more. But I would not call this ABM, which is specific pieces of content, specialized events and other materials created for a single account or a very small set of accounts. Generally speaking, to ‘scale’ ABM means that you forfeit 1-1 customized programs.

How to decide – should you pursue ABM or more traditional Target Account Marketing? Let the data decide. Run the economics of additional ABM labor and program costs against the expected increased revenue from that set of accounts and compare this ROI to your next best set of marketing programs. Put slightly differently, consider and analyze your marketing programs as a set of investments and select based on the best performance, whether ABM or another program.

You’ll ask several questions along the way, for instance:

Are there relatively few accounts that will drive a large amount of revenue?
Would specialized, focused attention (ABM) to these accounts drive more deals or shorter deal cycles?
Could you move customers to more quickly adopt your product and therefore drive future revenues with ABM?

You must also assess your current systems and the level to which you can provide Named Account Marketing – or customization at scale. Current Marketing Automation, CRM and third party systems allow for sophisticated engagement based on time and activity by the account. A fully deployed Named Account Marketing program may require account-based advertising programs, website customization, dynamic nurture content, targeted contact acquisition, custom field events/programs, direct mailers and more. Do your current systems allow you to provide the level of customization your accounts need without the added time and expense of ABM?

The bottom line is that you need a clear understanding of revenue objectives, how marketing and sales together will drive this revenue, and the economics of these programs.

Lesson: ABM can be a great fit if you are willing to spend more time and budget per closed-won deal at a small number of accounts compared to more traditional Target Account Marketing programs.

Credits: Here’s a big shout out to the marketing team at Alteryx for their work with me on our journey to ABM. I’d also like to thank Jon Miller and the Engagio team for their thorough work in creating seminal ABM materials.

Marketing Advisor

Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies

For the last 20 years, I have led demand generation teams supporting high growth technology companies. Now working as an independent consultant, my responsibility is to apply best practices in the creation of these programs. My goal is to enable marketing teams to become self sufficient with a data driven culture of KPI's, test and measurement in service of achieving company revenue targets. My approach is to work with senior management identifying objectives and wildly important goals. With these in mind, we work together to build programs, processes and systems that will reach these goals along with the measurement KPI's to evaluate progress. Along the way we will enable the team to manage and maintain these systems so achieving these goals becomes a natural cadence of the marketing organization.

Category: Account Based Marketing

To Incent (a trial) or Not To Incent? It Depends.

Choose Wisely: Account Based Marketing or Target Account Marketing?