Strategic Approach to Marketing Communication for Account Managers: 6 Advantages

Working with a large book of business presents many challenges to account managers. They need to do a great job prioritizing their books of business, balance customer-facing and administrative work, be disciplined in their daily activities, and more. When it comes to customer engagement, many solutions are available today to automate and streamline email communication sent to customers. While the benefits of such solutions are clear, the lack of a strategic approach when using them presents multiple risks. Firstly, some account managers tend to get overly excited about these tools and send too many emails, so, as a result, more and more customers end up unsubscribing from communication. Secondly, the email flows are often not well-thought, so, as a result, they may include one initial meaningful message and numerous reminders which only irritate customers. And these are just two examples — the risks are many. In our account development team in Wrike instead of allowing reps to send whatever flows they like, we have a strategic approach to email communication. We thoroughly and consistently prepare communication plan that is based on data and aligned with our goals. Leveraging such an approach presented a number of advantages which I would like to share in this article.

Data-driven content

Different account managers in the team may have completely different copywriting skills. Some may prepare amazing emails that would lead to high customer engagement while others may not be that good at this point. Also, when preparing more and more emails AMs rarely rely on the effectiveness of the previously sent ones. The strategic approach helps to mitigate both risks. Firstly, all the communication is well-planned and prepared. The topics for emails are carefully analyzed and the wording is polished. An important note: by saying “polished” here I mean “well-prepared” — not necessarily written by a professional copywriter. While it is always good to have copywriters available to review/proofread emails, our experience tells us that emails that do not look perfect are more likely to be read, since they look like they have been written by a real person. Secondly, the strategic approach enables teams to thoroughly analyze the effectiveness of each campaign. Marketing communication solutions available on the market usually provide a lot of statistical information to analyze — from the number of clicks and opens to the percentage of customers who reacted to the CTA (call to action). So whenever the next campaign is being planned, the previous successes and failures are taken into account.

No uncontrollable ineffective flows

One of the key advantages the marketing communication solutions provide is the ability to launch campaigns also known as flows. The cadence can be set for the next email in the queue to be sent in 3 days, then another one in 5 days, etc. The flaw of this approach is that generic emails that are part of the campaign are rarely effective. Many of us received these neverending follow-ups starting with “just wanted to bubble this back to the top of your inbox…”. Launching a long multi-step campaign that is not well thought-through creates a dangerous illusion that the customer is being engaged. In fact, the customer gets bombarded by a long flow of generic and ineffective messaging and the most probable outcome of such flow would be an increase in the number of unsubscribed clients. Reminders may be effective and we sometimes include them in our campaigns. But it’s very important not to overdo them. When setting up campaigns always keep in mind that there’s no secret sauce. Different messaging would resonate with different categories of clients and it is totally fine. This is exactly why I recommend considering sending multiple campaigns on different topics versus numerous follow-ups to a single campaign. As you can imagine, having all the account managers continuously setting up and maintaining these campaigns could be pretty time-consuming. Doing it in a centralized way takes a lot of weight off their shoulders and enables them to focus on the actionable results of these campaigns — scheduled meetings with customers.

Compliance with local laws

As mass email communication has been evolving, additional laws have been introduced in different countries that govern end-user privacy and, among many other things, the ability to unsubscribe from email communication. Lack of compliance with these laws creates risks of serious fines for the companies. When account managers are launching campaigns by themselves they may not be aware of certain laws as well as lack the technical knowledge to set up those campaigns correctly (e.g. to include the mandatory “unsubscribe” option that should be at the bottom of all sent emails). So the probability of non-compliance with the law due to human factors is increased. When the campaigns are being set up in a centralized way, all the risks would be mitigated globally — the employee preparing and launching the flows would make sure that emails comply with all requirements and unsubscribed customers are automatically excluded from all communication. As a result, the risks of paying huge fines are reduced to a minimum.

Less email fatigue for the customers

The more emails clients receive from the company, the less likely they would be paying attention to every single one of them. The results of an initial campaign sent through a marketing communication solution may be astonishing — dozens of meetings could be scheduled and multiple upgrade opportunities discovered. Account managers become very enthusiastic and send more and more campaigns. But over time they notice that the following campaigns are becoming less and less impactful. And instead of pausing and revising their strategy, they may choose to double the volume of emails that are being sent. As a result, more customers would start to either not react to the emails or, in the worst-case scenario — unsubscribe from communication. The strategic approach helps to mitigate this risk. Firstly, a reasonable data-driven cadence of emails is being established. Secondly, the person coordinating the initiative would review whether any other teams in the company — product, marketing, research, and others — are sending any communication to the customers and align with them on a global plan. As a result, the possibility of a situation where a client receives 3 emails from 3 different teams on the same day is eliminated.

Combination of upsell and educational campaigns

After several successes with upsell campaigns account managers may be tempted to continue sending them frequently. Such an approach creates a risk of customers never buying at full price — they would eventually figure out that they just need to wait for another week or two and get yet another special offer. This is why I strongly recommend limiting the number of upsell campaigns sent within a calendar quarter as well as mixing them with educational/informational ones. Educational flows enable the clients to learn more about the product and potentially noticeably increase the value they’re getting from it. As a result, they would become more open to increasing their spending with the company. We divide educational flows into two logical buckets — the one that just informs the customer of something (e.g. new releases, industry reports, etc) and the one containing a call to action. An example of the latter is a campaign where an overview is made of a certain solution available in the product and an offer to connect with an account manager to learn more, do a Q&A session, etc. Educational campaigns also play an important role in mitigating the risk of customers unsubscribing from communication since they’re getting tangible value from those emails. When this combination of upsell and educational campaigns is prepared and launched strategically, AMs don’t need to come up with the topics themselves. Instead, they get a stable stream of incoming meetings which enable them to discover opportunities and hit their numbers.

Easier to plan enablement

It is likely that in any given sales team the level of product knowledge and sales skill varies among the team members. Some have worked in the company for a while and do not need much coaching while others may be new to the team and require a lot of support. When the campaigns are planned strategically, the leadership team has visibility into which of them are going to be launched and when. This makes the planning of training and enablement on the topics covered in campaigns much an easier task. Firstly, the communication plan would be shared with the team at the meeting and the team members would be asked whether they feel comfortable holding meetings on certain topics. Some might welcome the help while others would consider it unnecessary since they’re already good at those particular topics. Secondly, the enablement team would know exactly what to prepare for the training sessions to make the most of them. As a result, account managers arriving at the customer meetings would be confident, well-prepared and do an amazing job owning the conversation.

A strategic approach to marketing communication proved incredibly effective for our account development team here at Wrike. It helps us to save a lot of time for account managers that they repurpose to have more customer meetings, discover more opportunities, and be very successful in their roles.