Account-based marketing may cost more than regular marketing campaigns but also have a greater return on investment.
When you perform account-based marketing, you switch from conveyor belt marketing to handmade marketing. You aren’t mass producing the same marketing experiences for a large audience. You’re creating customized, optimized campaigns for each account.
Learn how to measure account-based marketing results and use those account-based marketing metrics to improve your strategies for a higher return.
Are Your ABM Campaigns Connecting with the Right People?
The first set of account-based marketing metrics you’ll analyze will tell you about WHO you are reaching. These metrics don’t directly inform you about your profits. Instead, they’re letting you know you’re on the right track.
Buyer Persona
The first step is to create a B2B buyer persona. A buyer persona in account-based marketing focuses on decision-makers within your target accounts. When businesses build their strategies around a persona, they see more page views, longer stays on your website, and, on average, a 171% increase in their ROI.
You will include:
- Demographics
- Firmographics
- Role in the company
- Decision-making power
- Psychographics
- Pain points
Your buyer persona guides your lead identification process. It’s the mirror you hold leads up to and reflects how well those leads match your target audience. Track your ideal leads through the process to ensure the profiles you create match the leads you convert. Adjust your buyer persona to target the most relevant leads if you don’t see much alignment.
Image from Semush
In-Market Accounts
In-market accounts tell you the total number of accounts in your industry in the market for your products. Tracking these numbers helps you understand what percentage of your total percentage you’re reaching. If you reach 1,000 accounts, it might seem like a win until you see 10,000 in-market accounts. Now, you realize you’re only reaching 1% of in-market accounts and have a large growth potential.
Qualified Leads
Don’t wait until you make a sale to measure your account-based marketing conversion rate. Conversion rates apply throughout your ABM sales cycle.
One of the more crucial account-based marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) to track is conversions between leads to marketing qualified leads. Then, track marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads.
Think of these conversions as checkpoints. ABM accounts don’t move to the next stage of the buyer’s journey until they pass that checkpoint. It might include fulfilling specific actions, meeting set criteria, or expressing interest in moving forward.
By measuring these mini-conversions, you can tell at what point you’re losing most accounts in your marketing process and where you’re most successful.
Are Your Campaigns Resonating with Your Audience?
Here are a few critical account-based marketing KPIs to monitor and measure how well your marketing campaigns connect with your target accounts.
Engagement Rates
Your engagement rates will be one of the most telling factors to how well you connect with your audience with relevant information.
Each marketing channel has its unique list of engagement factors to watch that will tell you whether your accounts are viewing and responding positively to your marketing efforts.
- Open rate
- Delivered rate
- Clickthrough rate
- Unsubscribe rate
Social Media:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Follows
Website Content/Blogs
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Clickthrough rate
- Bounce rate
Not only can you identify weaknesses, but monitoring these KPIs also helps you identify your greatest strength. For instance, monitoring your email engagement rate will highlight the time of day that most engagement occurs. You can adjust your email schedule to that time of day to increase your account engagement.
Sales Cycle Length
How long does your average ABM sales cycle last from the first touchpoint to a final sale?
The shorter your sales cycle lasts, the more money you will save.
Account-based marketing sales cycles tend to be 30% shorter than traditional strategies. Due to the much shorter sales cycle, businesses saw an average increase of 8–10% in revenue.
Image from Optimizely
Measuring your sales cycle helps you identify any issues that might delay the close. Measuring your sales cycle in smaller increments can help you narrow down issues further.
For instance, you might monitor the time between generating and becoming a marketing-qualified lead. Then, measure the time it takes for a marketing-qualified lead to become a sales-qualified lead, so you can keep leads moving easily from one stage to the next.
Customer Satisfaction
Your customer satisfaction rate is the percentage of total customers satisfied with the product or service. Having customer satisfaction surveys throughout the sales cycle and after interactions helps you identify areas where accounts are most satisfied and times the experience does not meet their expectation.
Are Your Campaigns Turning a Profit?
Now, we arrive at the account-based marketing metric that makes all the hard work worthwhile – your profits. We will look much deeper than the dollar amount as a modern account-based marketing strategy is customer-centric, making their satisfaction and loyalty as crucial as your company’s profits.
Return on Investment
Your ABM return on investment is the money you gain after investing in nurturing and converting a lead.
Begin by calculating customer acquisition costs. These are all the costs involved in converting the lead from lead generation to sales. This number will seem high if you’re used to traditional marketing numbers. But that’s normal for account-based marketing because you play a much bigger game with higher stakes.
Your goal is for your profits to exceed your customer acquisition costs.
However, your profits are more than a single sale. Account-based marketing looks at the customer’s lifetime value. This is the value a new customer brings over their entire time with your company.
For example, you won’t just look at the first-year contract if you have a subscription-based service. You’ll want to look at the value they bring from renewing their annual contract over several years. You’ll also calculate the value from recommendations to your businesses, which brings in additional customers.
Conversion Rates
Your ABM conversion rate looks at how many of your total leads purchased a product. It’s that final stamp of approval letting you know your ABM marketing and sales strategies were successful.
If you have a low conversion rate, you may not see a profit because you’re not converting enough accounts to offset all your nurturing costs. However, a high conversion rate indicates you built strong and successful campaigns.
Churn Rate
Church rate looks beyond your first sale and monitors how long those accounts stay with your business. Subscription-based businesses or those offering supplies businesses regularly need may stay around for years.
Most account-based marketing campaigns aim to build loyal customers. That’s why relationship-building plays a crucial role in your strategies. Those relationships will motivate your customers to continue buying your supplies or subscribing to your software.
A low churn rate signifies you have many satisfied and loyal customers, which is your ultimate goal and will greatly increase your customer lifetime value.
Measure Your Way to Account-Based Marketing Success
Account-based marketing relies on a strong relationship you can build through personalized interactions and customized experiences.
Hushly offers a new way to create these experiences without cutting your ROI as well as the means to measure your success so you can make every dollar count.
Our AI-powered software collects crucial data from accounts, helping you understand their interest and movement throughout the sales cycle. It then personalizes their online website experience to ensure they receive the most relevant information.
Book a demo to see how Hushly can boost your account-based marketing ROI.
