Sales and marketing leaders while talking about efficiency know that Account-Based Marketing allows you to align your teams around the same targeted accounts to promote long-term growth, delight customers, and boost revenue.

Account-Based Marketing needs sales and marketing teams to work together to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers. ABM is defined by holistic thinking and engaging relevant personas within your target accounts while focusing on quality growth, not quantity metrics.

Successful Account-Based Marketing Strategies require a shared list of target accounts and following a set of account-based principles that focus on quality, not quantity to help sales and marketing teams work as one, and focus resources on the highest propensity accounts.

While there are many benefits associated with ABM including efficient use of your marketing budget and better customer experience, below are the ones that mostly and positively have made an impact.

1. Marketing and Sales Alignment with Account-Based Marketing

B2B decisions aren’t made by individuals, they’re made by teams. ABM is a tight partnership between marketing and sales. A highly targeted and data-driven strategy, ABM enables you to identify and reach mutually-identified high-value customers. It allows collaboration between teams and better communication across the organization. This enables your teams to pick up the account even after a while no matter how long it has been with your company.

# SMARTe helps you find updated contacts within your TA as well as follow your champions to their new account.

2. Increased relevancy among your Target Accounts

The account you choose to invest in requires personalization. Your content, product-based information, communications, and campaigns are personalized and customized allowing you to position your business in the most relevant way for your target accounts. Your target accounts see you as what they need to solve their challenges using your products and services.

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3. Streamlining your sales cycle

You will usually research your prospect’s information, then connect, have a discovery call, and try to close the deal, and on closing, delight by providing a consistent customer experience.

Data-driven Account-based marketing streamlines your sales cycle by ensuring that the accounts you target are the right ones for your business. You thus have a sales cycle that starts by identifying Target accounts, presenting and closing, and ensuring a delightful personalized customer experience.

4. Measuring ROI becomes easier with Account-Based Marketing

With ABM, it becomes easier to measure the return on investment for every account you invest time and resources in and confirm whether that account was your Ideal Customer Profile. Thus, helping you to identify and target similar accounts. You’ll then have a data-driven account-based marketing model to get moving your strategy forward.

# We can help you find lookalike customers with global contact discovery for those ABM/ target accounts.

5. Quality over Quantity

Account-Based Marketing requires you to invest time and resources in those chosen, high-value accounts instead of struggling to close less qualified leads who may not be the best fit. And as a result, you’ll have loyal customers who later turn into your best marketers ensuring good word of mouth and helping you expand business among their network.

A great data-driven Account-Based Marketing strategy promises holistic growth and retention for your accounts while making sure your revenue teams are well synced towards a common goal.

The most important element that fuels your ABM strategy: ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING DATA

It is important to meet your Target Audience where they are by building an account intelligent database. To understand how SMARTe can help you boost your Account-Based Marketing efforts, First Step TO Get Qualified Leads

The post Why ABM is your answer – Personalized, Pivotal and Proven! appeared first on SMARTe .

What is Email Bounce Rate?

Email Bounce Rate basically means your prospect did not even receive the information you wanted them to read. A high bounce rate is usually very frustrating for most email marketers.

Depending on how serious the problem is, email bounces can be categorized as either hard or soft. Hard bounces are essentially permanent delivery failures. This is most likely a result of an erroneous email id or incorrect domain.

Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures that usually occur if the recipients’ inbox is full or your email attachment is possibly too large. It also happens if the email is unsolicited. In such cases, ensure your sourced data comes with opt-in permission to avoid soft bounces.

How to reduce email bounce rates?

There are quite a few things about email deliverability that are out of your control. We, at SMARTe, can help you with almost everything that’s within your control. There are plenty of things you can do to reduce your email campaign’s bounce rates.

1.  Use only permission-based, opt-in data

We, at SMARTe, understand that running successful campaigns and maximizing the impact of those campaigns demands high-quality contact and company data with accurate email addresses. The simplest and the most critical way to avoid email bounces is by ensuring you don’t send emails to people you have not taken permission from. We provide GDPR compliant, double opt-in data to our customers offering SLA guaranteed, 100% email accuracy

2. Verify Email Addresses

This seems obvious, right? Ensure in advance that all email addresses are verified and accurate. SMARTe’s database has custom-built GDPR compliant company data and customer data list with verified emails and direct-dial phone numbers across different geographies. Our Data Enrichment services streamline your CRM/MAP data and ensure we provide verified and accurate email addresses

3.  Run frequent and consistent campaigns

Email lists can go stale within a few months. Lists that have remained dormant for over a year can invite spam complaints apart from bounces. Send your subscribers a welcome email to engage with them right from the start and keep sending relevant messages consistently. By engaging with them regularly, you’ll notice that you receive fewer bounces over a period of time rather than seeing a large number of bounces from a list that has been contacted sparingly.

4. Understand that email data quality is critical for the success of your campaigns

Email marketers tend to spend a lot of time on the content, layout, and design of your email structure. However, if your package is sent to the wrong address, does it really matter how beautifully it was wrapped? Absolutely not. Sending to a list of prospects chosen from an accurate contact database ensures that your thoughtfully written message gets delivered to the intended recipients.

To know more about how SMARTe offers customized solutions that will always keep your data accurate and up-to-date, contact our sales team today! SMARTe solutions provide SLA guaranteed, 100% accurate email addresses

The post 4 Tips to Deliver Impactful Email Campaigns That Are Truly Data-driven appeared first on SMARTe .

Can you name a single business that has never lost a customer? Whenever customers are unhappy, whatever the reason it may be, they leave. It’s that simple. The number of customers that leave during a specific time period can be called ‘customer churn’.

What is customer churn?

Every expert has a different take on what is customer churn. But at its core, any business’s customer churn rate indicates the rate at which it is losing customers. To put in perspective, how soon are your customers unsubscribing. If we introduce formulae, that equation would look something like this:

(Number of Customers Lost) ÷ (Original Number of Customers)

For instance, if a business started with 100 customers, and over the course of a month lost 10 customers, then it would indicate a monthly customer churn rate of 10%.

But this does not include any new revenue or sales as part of this data. Those customers will be part of the calculations for the next month. This is where the formulae don’t work – when you bring revenue into the picture. Businesses are often most interested in seeing how customer retention has impacted total revenue. Consequently, it is important to calculate retention in terms of revenue.

To start with, you have to calculate your MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). MRR is pretty much the income your company can surely anticipate every 30 days. To calculate revenue churn, you have to divide the figure by the MRR you lost over the course of the month. While calculating these figures, do not forget to subtract any new revenue you might have generated from existing customers through upselling or cross-selling.

Let’s say your MRR at the beginning of the month is $100,000. At the end of the month, it reduces o $70,000. During that time period, you also add $20,000 from existing customers by cross-selling. So, your revenue churn rate can be calculated as shown below:

(($100,000 – $70,000) – $20,000) ÷ $100,000 = 10%

Why is customer retention important?

It is the financial aspect of it that bothers most companies. It is far more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain one. The old rule of thumb says it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it did to retain one.

Your customer retention rate can speak a lot about the current health of your business. You get a good idea of how many customers are bailing on your business—and how fast they’re leaving.

Data-driven strategies to reduce customer churn can work wonders. A McKinsey report in 2014 stated that “executive teams that make extensive use of customer data analytics across all business decisions see a 126% profit improvement over companies that don’t”

The same truths are revealed by KPMG, who found that customer retention is the main driver of a company’s revenue.

How to reduce customer churn?

Customer retention is extremely critical to the health of any business, regardless of size or industry. It is a common representation of a business’s ability to keep its existing customers and maximize its revenue growth. It is important to dig into the factors that drive your customer retention rate and generate opportunities to improve your customer success strategy.

Talk to the customers who are leaving

When a customer decides he doesn’t want to do business with you anymore, don’t let that customer walk out the door before you know why. Getting answers to these questions can provide you with valuable feedback. Many a time, customers leave because they had trouble using your solution. Or maybe, it just didn’t solve their problems. Either way, it will help you improve your product

Understand why customers are leaving

Once you have the data on why your customers are leaving, it is time to put that data to work. There could be a wide variety of issues. Make sure you look at more than just the recent issues. Many a time, we focus on the latest issues, but we realize later that the customer was leaving due to a chain reaction of poor service. All of those incidents must have destroyed your brand image and hard work.

Go back to your best customers

Once you know why some customers have left, identify a pool of customers that are most likely to cancel next, and focus your efforts on keeping them onboard. Prioritize the most profitable customers who are on the brink of churning.

Be proactive. Always be proactive.

Reach out to your customers before they even need you. They have to know that you are invested in helping them grow as a business. Make sure your messaging is personalized and should be directly tied to the challenges they face. If you notice that they are not using your product to its full potential, send them a friendly Hi.

Provide a roadmap for your new customers

Getting started with a new product can be quite overwhelming for anyone. And if a customer any challenges implementing or using your product as soon as they sign up, they will soon lose interest. You have to guide these customers and provide them with a roadmap clearly educating them about the product’s features, functionality, and process. Make it difficult for your customers to leave by letting them know that you are always keeping an eye out for them.

Long-term contracts

Offer longer subscription mode, extending your customers’ commitment. This way, you will have enough time to implement the product and provide a definite roadmap. The customer will also realize the benefits over time and they will be more likely to commit to the product.

Make your best people deal with the customers who are leaving

It’s not exactly impossible to retain customers who have decided to leave. Figure out who your best, most vocal, and convincing B2B customer sales reps are, and let them talk to those customers. Let them make use of their experience and charm in dealing with unhappy customers.

Focus on the data

All good business decisions start with data. Gather this data by offering a short survey for a customer who is canceling or unsubscribing from your solution. It can be as simple as “Please tell us why you want to leave”. Ideally, these forms should not take more than a minute to complete. Offer the customer an opportunity to explain why he wishes to leave. Consider asking direct questions like “Did you have a bad experience?” and “Are you finding better pricing or service somewhere else?”.

Great customer experience should be at the core of the strategy of any forward-thinking company. If you treat your customers well, not only are they more likely to stick around, they may also become advocates, and get your referrals, thereby helping your business grow.

High customer churn rates can destroy your sales team’s motivation. To reduce the impact of customer churn, it is important you always have good leads flowing into your pipeline. To know more about how we can help, reach out to us.

The post Customer Churn Explained: How to Use Data to Keep Your Customers from Leaving? appeared first on SMARTe .

B2B sales is not and was never easy. About 50% of all sales go to the first company that responds. Whenever you cold call your prospects, meet them while networking at events, there are proven strategies to turn prospects into customers that have always worked for ages. This is because selling is a science and is process-oriented. Once you master sales, you can use various techniques to quickly reach your targets and earn that incentive.

However, things have radically changed now. The way you prospect has changed forever since May 2018 – after the implementation of the EU Data Protection Regulation call GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation).

Penalties involved

GDPR penalties can be €20 million or 4% of the company’s global revenue. However, there are two tiers of penalties depending on the severity and kind of violation. GDPR penalties issued for violations pertaining to data processors typically fall under the first tier, which guidelines state can be as severe as €10 million or 2% of global revenue.

Data protection authorities have frequently demonstrated their ability to issue penalties. British Airways was fined up to €200 million for a data breach that in September 2018. Marriot International was fined almost €99 million for a data breach between 2014 and 2018. Even small and medium-size enterprises were not spared.

Misconceptions

GDPR was EU’s most path-breaking privacy update in over two decades. Yet, over 57% of B2B sales professionals are not aware of what GDPR is (source: Demand Gen Report). If you fall in that category, it is high time you took a good hard look at how GDPR has affected your sales team and how you can “legally” prospect while staying compliant with GDPR.

Here are few common misconceptions.

“GDPR will not be affect my sales team”

You may assume that GDPR does not apply to you. But for many companies, GDPR has forced a big shift in your prospecting efforts and strategies. GDPR will definitely have an impact on you if –

1. You purchase leads to fill up your sales pipeline

2. You add leads collected from events to your mailing lists

3. You ask your loyal customers for referrals

“GDPR can only impact European businesses”

The whole point of the GDPR is to protect data belonging to EU citizens and residents. However, GDPR still applies to you if you

a. Process personal data as part of the activities of one of its branches established in the EU, regardless of where the data is processed

b. Were established outside the EU and is offering goods/services or is monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EU

It does not matter if your business is based in the EU or not – if the personal data you collect on your prospects belongs to an EU citizen then you’re liable to comply with GDPR. Read in detail here.

“Once I have sought permission to store data, I can use it the way I want”

GDPR restricts the way you can process (use) personal data. When you have possession of personal data (eg. Email address), you have to make sure that your prospects have actively chosen to opt-in to your email before you start sending marketing communications. You can’t assume you can run mass email campaigns just because you possess the data.

GDPR compliance means your sales teams would have to make some changes to stay within the law. Here are some sales prospecting techniques you should use to sell without breaking the law.

GDPR Compliant Data: Collect Data and Seek Permission

The most typical example of seeking permission is through a web form. Post-implementation of GDPR, the prospect must not only know what data you collect but also why and how you intend to use it. Individuals also have the right to be informed of the period for which their personal data will be stored. (Read more here – Article 13 and Article 14)

Cold Calling

Cold calling is one of the most effective ways to reach out to potential customers. Cold calling doesn’t fall under the same regulation like the GDPR. Every time you add a new prospect to your CRM database, you need to get their consent before you send them promotional emails. While you are on the call, ask them if they would like to receive a newsletter. If they say yes, send them the link where they can subscribe (or opt-in) to your content.

Since it is difficult to document their consent (unless you are recording the conversation), it makes sense to send a follow-up email summing up everything you discussed over the call. If your prospect demands to be removed from the list, you have to honor that request.

Marketing and Lead lists

Marketing Lead lists were always a great way to fill up your pipeline. Things changed a bit after GDPR. If you acquire leads from third-party data vendors, they have to take consent to share that information with you. You also will need specific consent to use email addresses on the list, unless they have agreed to have their data transferred to third parties. SMARTe provides you GDPR compliant data with custom-built double opt-in company data and customer data lists with verified emails and direct-dial phone numbers across 200+ countries.

Email Marketing

If you have been bombarding your prospects with cold prospecting emails and sales pitches, you should stop immediately! If you have never contacted the prospect earlier, make sure you have tried to contact them through the phone before emailing them.

Although, you can continue to send cold sales emails to prospects if the email is sent to an individual and not to a group of recipients and you have put up a privacy statement explaining why you are contacting them in the first place (i.e. you have a legitimate interest).

Website

You may be already using a web form to capture contact information. However, you need to be sure as GDPR requires you to legally justify the personal data you capture from your web forms. You can ask only for the information you need. If you ask for additional information like income (to prioritize leads), you have to make sure you have a legit purpose. Else, just ask for name, company, and business email address only. Also, just because they signed up for your eBook or webinar doesn’t mean they have opted-in for all your email communication.

Social Media

GDPR doesn’t stop you from finding and connecting with potential customers on social media platforms like LinkedIn. You can continue to use social media as part of your overall sales prospecting strategy. Once your prospect accepts your connection request, you can reach out and message them to gain consent to contact them and sell to them.

However, it is mandatory to establish that there is a legitimate interest to be able to contact them by email or by phone. You’ll have to take consent. However, consent to contact them cannot be considered as consent to send them mass marketing campaigns!

Events

Networking at events is a great way to meet new prospects. It basically means storing contact information on a business card in your CRM. Post GDPR, you may continue to exchange and store business card information, but you cannot use their contact data and email address for email marketing purposes unless you have taken their consent and they have opted-in to receive your promotional emails.

SMARTe is committed to complying with GDPR and we follow privacy and security best practices that are applicable to our industry and offers. We have developed GDPR aligned processes by setting stringent rules on how we process, gather, and protect individual data. Ensure data relevancy through our rich data taxonomies, dictionaries, and ontologies. Stay GDPR compliant with accurate, double opt-in data with verified phone numbers.

SMARTe is GDPR compliant in sourcing our business contact data and in processing personal data. We enable our customers to adhere to laws and regulations that apply to their business. Anytime our customers send marketing emails to their own customers, our data ensures that they adhere to digital marketing laws that apply in the particular data subject’s geographic locale.

Is your data GDPR compliant? If not, we can help.

The post About GDPR: Penalties, Assumptions and How to Sell Without breaking the law using GDPR Compliant Data appeared first on SMARTe .

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the latest buzzword for B2B Marketing. AI is changing the way we market to our customers; and no strategy is more perfectly positioned for it than account-based marketing (ABM). B2B marketers know that ABM strategies can yield significantly higher conversion rates than traditional marketing. It can deliver a much more deeply personalized customer experience and a more efficient and target-oriented sales team. With AI powering your ABM strategy, you can get insights into your prospects’ levels of engagement and the success of their campaigns.

Like most marketing teams, you are likely looking to scale your efforts towards an ABM strategy. Today, with increased buyer demands, ad-hoc data sources, and advances in Artificial Intelligence, a unified and accurate customer data is critical to running account-based marketing programs at scale. Given below are a few ways AI can have a profound impact on your ABM strategy.

Target the right accounts with accurate data

AI is a capable to gauge intent, thereby making it a great tool for the account selection process. From a Total Addressable Market that meets a basic set of your criteria like revenue, employee count and industry-type, Artificial intelligence can help you narrow down and tell you how well the set of accounts fits within your ideal customer profile. Specifically, at SMARTe, we use Artificial Intelligence and NLP technologies in combination with decades of domain expertise to provide accurate, high- quality global contact data.

Take Your Relationship-Building to a Whole New Level

Artificial Intelligence can identify patterns and insights humans would not usually find. Once it understands the motivations behind consumer actions, AI uses it to develop more personalized marketing messages.

Depending on where your prospect is within the marketing funnel, and the unique path they took to get there, you can serve them the most appropriate messaging that will take them to the next step. Marketing and Sales heads can use this capability to make sure no opportunity is wasted and no lead is left behind. Apart from its ability to automate almost everything you’re doing, one of the key features of AI is its ability to personalize content at the right time for every prospect.

Get your Sales and Marketing Teams to play the same tune

The most important benefit of ABM is the alignment of your sales and marketing teams; and AI can help you boost this coordination further. AI can provide sales with activity and behavioral data, which they can then act on in a unique case-by-case manner. This approach provides better ROI than the usual generalized “smiling and dialing” technique in which unsolicited calls are made to prospective clients.

The SDRs are provided with a whole dossier of information enabling them to pick up the phone and say, “I’ve researched your organization, I know so-and-so about you, you probably have this kind of a problem and here’s how we can help.”  You’re much more likely to score a meeting off the back of such a conversation.

ABM will always require a company-wide approach and AI can only complement your ABM efforts. But if it is used properly, and with the right technologies, you can do implement strategies that were unimaginable just a decade ago. To learn more about how SMARTe can dramatically scale and improve all aspects of your ABM strategy with its AI-enabled products like SMARTe Discover and SMARTe Enrich, contact our sales team today.

The post How AI Can Impact Account-Based Marketing in 2021 appeared first on SMARTe .