What do you get when the ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA team up for a webinar? An hour-long session jam-packed with important insights and key findings centered on ABM best practices and advanced strategies. What you don’t get is enough time to answer all the questions submitted from your webinar attendees.So we’ve created a blog series where ABM experts representing the members organization of the ABM Leadership Alliance answer questions focused on ABM & Covid-19, ABM 101, ABM Tactics and ABM Strategy. If you didn’t get a chance to watch the webinar, you can check that out here.

Looking for some ideas on how to improve your ABM? Read on for our answers on ABM Tactics.

Q: What kinds of incentives do you offer your prospects?

A: There is no right or wrong incentive. Best practice is to test various ones (swag, exec access, VIP status, conference passes, etc.) to know what works for your audience.  I would recommend testing for various levels as well (CMO vs. VP vs. Director) as well as for different personas (Sales vs. Marketing).  What works for one company may not work for another. Incentives can be a great and simple way to meet with accounts and people that matter.

Charm Bianchini, VP of Growth Marketing, LeanData 

Q: What’s the best technology you’ve found for running virtual sessions and what features really work in making these sessions engaging?

A: I think it’s less about which tech you use exactly and more about how you structure your content.

Some things we’ve been doing to make our webinars and other virtual events less boring:

➡️ Cameras on instead of/in addition to slides

➡️ Fun virtual backgrounds

➡️ Different speaker every 15 minutes or less

➡️ Share relevant content before, during and after the live session

➡️ Customer spotlights

➡️ Encourage attendees to turn mics on to ask questions, share insights

➡️ Interactive poll questions and results

➡️ Live demos

Cassandra Jowett, Sr. Director of Marketing, Pathfactory

Q: How does your team broach the topic of getting a demo for a donation?

A: We keep it simple: we just ask them for 30 minutes of their time and are offer to donate $30 to a charity on the prospect’s behalf in the meeting ask at the end of the email. Also, choosing a charity relevant to the time, such as services that support care for the elderly and vulnerable. If possible and you have flexibility, personalizing the charity offer to the individual works very well if you have researched them and have a good idea of their primary interests. We do not mention “uncertain times,” COVID or anything of negative connotation in the email.

Eric Martin, VP of Demand Generation, SalesLoft

Q: Can you elaborate on your “attendance conversion” of 40%? Is this for a post-webinar offer?

A: At ON24, we’re all about the data and every year we release a benchmarks report (feel free to check it out!) that details stats on how companies are using digital experiences to engage their audiences. One of the stats we look at is the average conversion rate from registration to attendance, which many factors can contribute to. From our findings, a 35-45% conversion rate is a great range to be in! And that can include on-demand viewership. Companies who make access to on-demand events easy see the benefits of increased viewership. On-demand is on the rise, with an average of 38% of views being on-demand only (up 2% from the previous year). 

Jane Menyo, Sr. Director, Solution Marketing, ON24

Q: PFL, Can you share more about “your office has moved!” campaign?

A: As our competition turns to a digital-only strategy, we saw this as our opportunity to stand out with a more personal and memorable touch. PFL kicked off a “Your Office Has Moved” campaign to adjust to the new environment.

PFL is having BDRs confirm mailing addresses and have layered preferred address collection into our automated campaigns.

This was the structure of our campaign:

Step 1: Craft our message and content.

Our strategy was to send our unused trade show swag (a playful pack of marketing meme cards with a tiny display easel). We’re hoping that it will brighten our prospects’ days and illustrate a way they can keep their goals on track despite trade show cancellations. For our call to action, we asked prospects to take a meeting with the sales rep named on the personalized note card.

Step 2: Plan our touchpoints.

Multichannel marketing is a must for our team at PFL. Our multichannel marketing report with Demand Metric found that response rates go up with the number of channels used. However, multichannel orchestration is the biggest driver of success. Integration between direct mail and digital increases the likelihood of direct mail ROI by 63%.

Here’s how we structured our multichannel ABM campaign:

Target contacts receive warm up emails and web ads.

• We created four emails, but if a recipient takes the call to action early in the sequence, the emails stop automatically.
• The emails and ads drive contacts to a web form to collect the preferred address. (More on this in Step 4.)

Form completion triggers the send of direct mail.

•  PFL prints, packages, and ships the package on-demand.

The contact receives the package.

• Our business development reps (BDRs) receive notice of delivery within 15 minutes thanks to PFL’s Tactile Marketing Automation software integration with FedEx. The BDR makes a timely call, increasing the opportunity for a live connection by up to 20%.
• If needed after the follow-up call, the contact will enter a follow-up sequence including additional emails and calls.

Step 3: Develop the contact list.

We started our list with 2019 and 2020 event registrants and attendees that fit our ideal customer profile (ICP).

Then, we segmented the list to identify target prospects not associated with an opportunity. We’re also allowing our sales reps and customer success managers to add contacts to the program through Marketo Insights, so they can show their in-pipe prospects and customers how we’ve adjusted our campaign structure to ask for addresses.

Finally, we built the audience in Marketo with an email address list.

Step 4: Build the web form to collect preferred addresses.

At present, the best strategy is to collect preferred addresses for one-time use only. Consumers are understandably sensitive to sharing their home addresses. We want to be clear that we’re sending something fun and that we will use their preferred address just one time. After shipment of direct mail, we’ll delete the address.

To avoid overwriting our contact’s business mailing addresses in Salesforce.com (SFDC), we created a new set of preferred address fields in Marketo.

Our web developers made two versions of the web form landing page, each with a different audience and messaging. One is a general version for future use, and one is a much more specific page attached to this web campaign.

Step 5: Create the campaign and ship it!

Next, we created two campaigns in Marketo.

The first was a nurture campaign that sends our emails.

The second was a Tactile Marketing Automation® (TMA®) campaign that triggers direct mail fulfillment when a form is submitted.

Marne Reed, Chief Evangelist, PFL

Do you want to continue to learn more from these amazing and insightful panelists? Make sure to follow the ABM Leadership Alliance on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with all things ABM right in your inbox. 

Stephanie Blackwell

Demand Generation Manager, Demandbase

Stephanie Blackwell is Demand Generation Manager at Demandbase. In this role, she works as the coordinator for the ABM Leadership Alliance as well as running campaigns for Demandbase. She has a background in partner marketing and reality television production.