Multi channel marketing campaigns have long been recognized as the most effective way to reach your customers. While 87% of retail businesses state that such campaigns are essential for business success, only 8% have managed to implement multi channel marketing. The situation in the B2B segment is similar. Many B2B marketers still don’t know how to effectively combine several channels and balance them to get the maximum benefit. We recommend ABM direct marketing as a valuable B2B tool uniting well-tried direct mail campaigns and account based marketing. Such a solution helps make your ABM strategy more personalized and increase the response rate.

What is ABM Direct Marketing?

If your sales team has ever sent a leaflet, handwritten notice, or any other mail piece, you know what direct mail campaigns look like. The concept of account based marketing (ABM) may be less familiar to a person who hasn’t used an account based marketing strategy before. Account based marketing is a business marketing strategy focused on a separate company as an account rather than a whole niche or a broad target audience. Marketers develop highly customized marketing campaigns to turn this company into a loyal customer and stimulate the necessary conversion.

With the revival of direct mail campaigns, account based marketing has moved to an absolutely new level. The combination of both approaches forms ABM direct marketing boosting an account-level ABM strategy with memorable mail pieces. It fills B2B marketing strategies with emotion and appeals to customers’ love for customized mail pieces that are tailored to individual customers’ tastes, needs, and preferences. Additionally, direct mail significantly increases the account based marketing response rate, with over 400% more responses than email.

What Companies will Benefit from ABM Direct Marketing?

ABM direct marketing is typically considered a B2B approach designed for large and medium enterprises interested in building long-term relationships with their customers. Why B2B marketing? Any ABM strategy requires careful planning, a lot of time, and considerable investment to start yielding results. These resources are usually available to large companies that are looking for reliable business partners to start mutually beneficial lasting cooperation. Moreover, the decision-making process in B2B sales involves more stakeholders than B2C. B2C marketing is often focused on the immediate result, covers a versatile target audience, and requires other techniques than those used in account based marketing.

Of course, even small and medium B2C businesses can benefit from some ABM direct marketing approaches. It’s always useful to implement multichannel personalized marketing to nurture the existing leads or use remarketing. You can also leverage direct mail to keep in touch with your customers, sending them exciting offers, discount vouchers, bills, or any other relevant mail piece. Don’t think that modern consumers no longer pay attention to offline marketing. Actually, 36% of people aged under 30 state they enjoy checking their mailboxes, which significantly increases your chances to be noticed using direct mail.

Why are ABM Direct Mail Campaigns So Efficient?

Building Long-Term Client Relationships

Focus on customer loyalty is the core of ABM direct marketing. Many other marketing approaches are all about immediate profit, but an ABM program is an investment into future relationships. Before launching any account based marketing strategy, your marketing team will need to create a detailed customer portrait, including demographics, interests, preferences, social media, and other relevant information. This helps to understand how to attract the attention of the stakeholders and convince them to order from your company. You can also use the collected data to create a custom mailing list adapted to the selected recipients. Such personalized marketing significantly contributes to your business image and makes clients consider your company as a likely partner even if they don’t place an order right now. According to the statistics, 84% of marketers state that an ABM program increased their brand awareness, with 74% witnessing improvement in customer relationships.

Better Analytics and Management

Since ABM direct marketing relies on a highly customized approach and covers a limited target audience, it’s easy to track. These are the target accounts you have been working with for some time. They may regularly provide you feedback or even send a handwritten note to thank you for a useful direct mail. This way, account based marketing solves a very common marketing problem. It helps to understand which of your marketing strategies are really effective. You know the people you target, how much you spent on this, and what return on investment to expect.

Joint Efforts of Sales and Marketing Teams

The epoch of cold calling and numerous spam emails has ended. Thanks to ABM direct marketing you can align marketing and sales teams to maximize the effectiveness of their efforts. Although this may require some careful planning, an automated mailing solution like Inkit can simplify the process.

For example, if your marketing team subscribes to Inkit, they can use a custom template builder to create the necessary design, add a convincing call to action and hand the mail piece over for automated printing and delivery. Within a few days, the recipients included in a CRM based mailing list receive the mail and check your offer (Remember that direct mail has a much higher response rate than emails). Once you are notified of the delivery, the sales team can join the process and contact the customer to discuss the cooperation. Direct mail campaigns notify your existing customers about the new or updated services in advance and prepare the ground for the conversion.

Multi Channel Marketing

The use of direct mail gives a strong impulse to traditional account based marketing. It turns a separate marketing approach into a multi channel strategy. Your target audience interacts with your branding at different levels, including email newsletters, social media, web resources, and direct mail. Moreover, as an offline marketing channel, direct mail campaigns also make your company look more reliable and promote trust. This is extremely important for B2B marketing, when the decision-making process is based on numerous factors and pain points, with your brand reputability being the key one.

Increased Revenue Potential

The Pareto principle also works for ABM direct marketing. Since 20% of key target accounts generate up to 80% of your profit, they honestly deserve a special treatment. There is no point in wasting time on tons of leads that are very unlikely to convert. You should better invest in more promising clients. 45% of B2B marketing specialists claim that ABM practices doubled their ROI significantly increasing the revenue potential.

How to Make ABM Direct Marketing More Effective with Inkit’s Automation?

Software platforms play an immense role in marketing optimization and customization. Regardless, many companies still don’t know which processes can be entrusted to automated tools – especially when it comes to ABM direct marketing. Although this approach requires a lot of manual work and preliminary individual research, at some point, you will be able to implement Inkit’s automation practices:

• Custom postcard builder. Having chosen the type of direct mail you need, sign in to Inkit and enjoy the creative design process. Thanks to versatile templates and functionality, you’ll generate an appealing postcard within the shortest time.
• CRM Integration. If your have already built your customer portrait and created a mailing list, use Inkit’s CRM integration. The tool will automatically target the right mail pieces at the right people. This will give your sales and marketing teams more spare time to focus on crucial tasks. Besides, you’ll eliminate the risk of human error.

Automated printing and delivery. Forget about regular time consuming visits to the post office or the nights spent stuffing envelopes. Inkit will print and deliver all direct mail for you. It supports worldwide delivery and needs only 3-6 days to reach end recipients after you click the Send button.