Now that ABM is such a large focus for many marketers, how are you effectively emailing everyone at a single company?

[Dan_Stevens_]

We're a very account-centric organization that markets and sells into existing accounts.  We also have a formal ABM program consisting of 12-15 global, enterprise accounts where entire campaigns are built around a single account.  As most of us know, sending a single email to several contacts at a single company often raises a red flag for potential spam (on the recipient's email server).  For those of you that already engage in this type of activity - and beyond using the "random sample" approach to place leads in smaller distribution lists - what sorts of tactics are you using to ensure your email makes it into the user's inbox?

We're participating in Marketo's early adopter program for ABM.  One of the items I'd like to see incorporated into Marketo is the ability to automatically stagger email sends (without having to manually setup random samples/static lists) so that they don't get flagged as spam.

[Mike_Donnelly]

Great discussion Dan and it's very common practice for corporate SPAM systems to trip when you're sending bulk messages (i.e. webinar invites, newsletters, etc.) to multiple people within the same account / domain.  I've seen some systems be as aggressive as 3 or more email contacts and then they drop the rest of them. They also don't tell the delivering system so it looks like they've been delivered.  One approach is assigning a random number to each contact within an account and segmenting your lists based on the number, which can definitely help, but can be incredibly time consuming and error prone.  You can also automate this - that's actually what our company does with it's send time optimization product.  Reach out off-line if your interested and I can send you some more details (mike@theseventhsense.com).

[SanfordWhiteman]

Assigning each contact within an account to a random bucket is error-prone? Howzzat? It either works or it doesn't.

[Mike_Donnelly]

Sorry, I should have clarified a bit more.  I meant to say that all of the extra steps to accomplish this process can make it more error prone for the person setting it up.

[Josh_Hill13]

I wrote about having an ABM manager embedded with sales or working closely with them.

Yes, this level of detail is prone to errors. Try to have someone QA everything.

[Dan_Stevens_]

We ran some reports on some recent email sends that were very account-centric - where we we've included some companies, with many contacts, into a relevant Engagement Program based on their perceived interest (website behavior, anecdotes from account exec, etc.).  Every email was marked as "delivered", yet when checking with some random people at the account, none of them received it.  Which leads me to believe that every email was intercepted by the company's spam filter(s) and never reached the recipients' inbox.  I'd have to think this is becoming the norm as companies step up their effort to block spam.  And sending an email to xx number of employees at the same time is a clear indication of what spam looks like.  We could have the most personalized, targeted, relevant messaging and calls-to-action possible, but if those messages aren't even making it to the users' inbox, then we have a problem.

So again, I'd be interested to know - given the increased focus of ABM within Marketo - if there are any enhancements planned to improve the effectiveness - from an operational perspective - of ABM/account-centric marketing.

Jeanne Penniman​

Jeanne Penniman​

MJ Jeswani​

[Anonymous]

I would propose that we take up the spam filter issue with the email deliverability team.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Would love to get their input here as well.  But it's common knowledge that anytime you send an email to many people at the same company, this is often a red flag for spam filters.  Thus why we'd love to hear if Marketo has any enhanced features on the roadmap to minimize this sort of activity - which is especially important for those of that have an account-centric focus.

[Rachel_Noble]

Hey Dan,

We're also firm believers in the value of an all-in ABM strategy. I know this doesn't directly answer your specific question, but after quite a bit of testing we've found that we increase our response rates dramatically when we use distinct messaging segmented by distinct persona identification. Mostly the personas within each org are automatically segmented by job title and we try to maintain separate email and direct mail assets based on the segmentation.

Rachel

[Dan_Stevens_]

Totally agree, Rachel.  My question was mainly around deliverability since this usually goes down significantly when sending emails to several contacts at the same company.  In fact, one of our accounts in our ABM program blocks all emails sent from Marketo (and yes, we have SPF/DKIM setup properly).

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

an Idea on this would make sense

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

There are already some ideas related to this:

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Voted

[Josh_Hill13]

You could post that as an Idea.

I thought Marketo already throttled for personal domains? Also think this is already an Idea.

The answer is I don't know how to do this beyond what you mentioned.