7 Successful Account Based Marketing Examples from Top B2B SaaS companies
Account-based marketing isn’t new, but it’s rising to the top of nearly every marketer’s to-do list.
In today’s hyper-personalized world, it’s difficult to market to the masses. Every lead is looking for something slightly different in your product, so generic email blasts and routine demos won’t cut it.
Prospects want a tailored experience. They want to be confident that the product they buy will satisfy their specific needs. That’s where account-based marketing strategies come into play.
When you know exactly who you’re targeting and what use cases might appeal to them, you can develop innovative ways to showcase the most relevant parts of your product to each of your ideal customer profiles.
We’ve collected a list of seven successful account-based marketing campaigns used by leading B2B SaaS companies and highlighted the tactics they used to create these campaigns. Read on to figure out how they used ABM campaigns to stand out among their competitors.
Account Based Marketing Tactics
The catch the attention of big accounts, you need to stand out.
Interactive demos, personalized gifting platforms, and multichannel marketing campaigns are all highly effective account-based marketing tools we saw used in our examples.
Interactive Demos
Interactive demos walk users through the most valuable parts of a product step-by-step. Interactive demos:
- Guide prospects to particular features that make them want to buy, unlike free trials where users get an empty account with little to no instructions
- Are no-code and fully customizable, meaning reps can quickly make and send personalized demos to top accounts
- Can be created for different personas, which can be used in highly targeted outbound marketing or ad campaigns
Personalized gifting
A personalized gifting platform is a system that enables companies to store, select, pack, and send corporate gifts to their prospects or customers. Personalized gifting:
- Surprises and delight prospects, prompting leads to poke around your website to learn more about your products or respond to an invitation to schedule a demo
- Allows you to tailor gifts to each prospect, or even let them pick their own gift, making the experience more personal
- Ties prospect engagement to campaign performance metrics, making it easy for account-based marketing teams to measure increases in conversion and pipeline generation rates
Multichannel Approach
Prospects are flooded with emails and ads, so sometimes you need multiple touchpoints to get a response. Multichannel ABM campaigns can target prospects via digital ads, LinkedIn ads, physical mail, email, and even chatbots. Using a multichannel approach:
- Boosts exposure, even with accounts outside of your ABM list
- Builds brand identity by appearing everywhere prospects typically hang out
- Allows you to reuse and upcycle some of your existing marketing materials
7 Real-life ABM Examples
Below is seven examples of leading SaaS companies leveraging account-based marketing tactics to expand their pipeline, book more meetings, create more opportunities, and boost conversion rates.
Salesloft
Salesloft empowers digital sellers to take the next best step in every sales situation, from lead nurturing to closing, by intelligently mining CRM data.
Salesloft’s Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Salesloft’s ICPs weren’t aware of the platform’s power.
Salesloft’s sales and marketing teams needed a better way to personalize their communication with potential customers. With the help of the Alyce curated marketplace, Salesloft developed a direct mail ABM campaign where SDRs could send prospects gifts that matched their interests.
ABM Tactic: Personalized gifting
Salesloft’s ABM Results
By pairing gifts with a meeting booker integration, Salesloft:
- Saw a 9% increase in meeting attendance
- Created new opportunities as a result of 20% of all gifts
- Got 50% of their BDRs to report being more aligned with strategic marketing programs
Getting buy-in from sales teams was critical to maximizing the results of future ABM and other marketing campaigns for Salesloft’s go-to-market teams.
LiveRamp
LiveRamp is an identity resolution provider that supplies third-party information to supplement companies’ first-party customer data. LiveRamp helps companies paint a 360-degree picture of their customer base by connecting these data streams.
LiveRamp’s Account Based Marketing Strategy
To produce and maintain such an extensive identity graph, LiveRamp needed to win over and onboard some of the world’s largest companies.
LiveRamp turned to account-based B2B marketing to do that as quickly and effectively as possible, concentrating heavily on target list creation and multichannel activation.
LiveRamp engaged every high-value customer in a way that suited their expected needs and interests and made for cohesive messaging across sales and marketing touchpoints. They personalized display ads, email promotions, multi-touch SDR strategies, and even direct mail.
ABM Tactic: Multichannel
LiveRamp’s ABM Results
Taking a multi-pronged approach paid off一LiveRamp:
- Had a 33% conversion rate from cold leads to meetings within four weeks, booking meetings with several Fortune 500 companies on their ABM list.
- Resurrected old accounts, giving LiveRamp reps the chance to share new product updates that could tip the scale towards conversion.
- Converted the most loyal customers: over two years of diligent ABM planning and execution led to a 25x increase in customer LTV.
Branch
Branch is a deep linking, mobile attribution company that helps digital businesses grow. By integrating Branch into companies’ marketing technology stacks, brands can monitor customer behavior and drive more conversions.
Branch’s Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Ironically, the Branch sales team struggled to drive high conversion rates themselves.
Although they had a gifting strategy in place, it was slow and manual. Poor alignment among the sales and marketing teams meant it took two months to pick out and send gifts, with the packaging, mailing, and tracking falling to one person.
But the marketing team at Branch didn’t give up on their gifting ABM campaign. Instead, they turned to a more modern gifting platform: Alyce. With Alyce in place, reps could tailor gifts to each prospect on their list in minutes.
And the campaign didn’t stop there. Once gifts arrived, prospects were enrolled in email, social media, or phone call campaigns, increasing the chances of booking a meeting with each touchpoint.
ABM Tactics: Personalized gifting, multichannel
Branch’s ABM Results
Using Alyce, Branch:
- Saved their team 30 hours in campaign set up and tracking, using prebuilt integrations with Marketo, Outreach, and Salesforce
- Brought in two six-figure deals
- Established an 18:1 pipeline-to-spend ratio
Form
Form is a digital assistant for frontline field workers. Through Form, agents in the field can access and update back-office information, making their companies more efficient and effective.
Form’s Account Based Marketing Strategy
Getting the attention of field service worker managers is difficult, as they are constantly dealing with changing schedules, intense work hours, and poor, outdated tooling.
Many field service managers don’t realize that Form could speed up data collection, improve communication, and give leaders real-time intelligence. And that’s precisely where ABM campaigns shine.
To get in front of potential customers, Form prepared a lead list and then did extensive research on those prospects, learning the ins and outs of their community, predicting their biggest pain points, and understanding what might prompt them to buy Form.
With that information in mind, Form’s marketing team built and sent custom self-guided interactive demos to each individual account.
ABM Tactic: Interactive demos
Form’s ABM Results
Highlighting Form’s value upfront got potential customers to understand the product quickly and have more informed conversations on sales calls, which:
- Saw a 33% increase in conversion to drive prospects into their sales funnel
- Decreased Form’s cost per lead by nearly 50% when compared to campaigns running with the “request a demo” CTA
- Inspired Form to repurpose interactive demos as calls to action on LinkedIn ABM campaigns, generating even more leads at a lower price point
PayScale
PayScale is a cloud-based compensation software that combines market data with advanced analytics to help employers pay their employees fairly.
PayScale’s Account Based Marketing Strategy
Compensation platforms like PayScale are a critical part of the HR function at any point in a business’s trajectory, especially for startups undergoing periods of high growth.
To capitalize on those groups, PayScale adopted a new account-based marketing campaign that delivered relevant ads to certain segments of their audience.
To start, their digital marketing team did ample research, combing through Salesforce leads’ and highlighting the best targets based on location, company size, and job title.
They built several versions of their ads that promoted content focused on detailed use cases that each decision-maker would likely be searching for.
ABM Tactic: Multichannel
PayScale’s ABM Results
Within just seven months, PayScale:
- Witnessed a 500% increase in target account traffic
- A 6x ROI in terms of revenue
- Pushed its conversion rate to an all-time high while decreasing its time to close by 45%
6Sense
6Sense is an account engagement platform that uses AI, big data, and machine learning to give revenue teams the insights they need to achieve predictable growth.
6Sense’s Account-Based Marketing Strategy
As you might imagine, the marketing team at 6Sense is always trying to find new ways to harness and utilize its platform internally.
Because the 6Sense platform clues the marketing team into who potential buyers are, what they care about, and where they are in their journey, ABM campaigns are a default strategy.
So 6Sense’s marketing team developed several extremely robust account lists. But when it came to creating the corresponding campaign, traditional email wasn’t going to make a big enough splash. They wanted to delight prospects with physical mail.
ABM Tactic: Personalized gifting
6Sense’s ABM Results
With Alyce, 6Sense could select the right gifts, send them at the right time, and prompt prospects to act. And it worked:
- Their ABM gifting campaign contributed to a 537% ROI
- 6Sense has now implemented similar account-based marketing strategies on four other teams within their company to deepen existing customer relationships and make prospects aware of how powerful 6Sense can really be
SourceDay
The SourceDay platform automates communication between buyers and suppliers, providing real-time pricing, quantity, and delivery information.
SourceDay’s Account Based Marketing Strategy
The SourceDay sales and marketing team spends a good deal of their time at industry conferences to spread the word about their platform and get face time with some of their top target accounts. But at large conventions, it’s challenging to stand out.
So SourceDay used a somewhat unconventional account-based marketing tactic.
Prior to the event, SourceDay built custom demos for the top accounts they hoped to interact with. This was a unique strategy and a memorable one, showcasing the SourceDay product in the best possible light for every prospect on their list.
ABM Tactic: Interactive demos
SourceDay’s ABM Results
Using Navattic’s interactive demos, SourceDay:
- Created 30 new opportunities
- Saved solutions consultants’ time: SCs spent 30% less time on early stage demos, focusing instead on higher value, more strategic deals
Account based marketing campaigns generate real results by giving prospects the customized experience they’re looking for. Prospects that feel recognized can tell that you’ve done your research, and can envision themselves using your product are likely to be your biggest fans.
Keep reading to see how interactive demos and outbound marketing grows sales pipeline: