Account-based marketing and B2B email: targeting your strategic accounts

In brief: Account-based marketing turns prospecting on its head. You pick a handful of companies first, then write to each one as if it were a market of its own. Email plays the lead role, provided you know how to speak to several decision-makers, look after your deliverability and stay within the rules set by the CNIL, the French data protection authority.

What is account-based marketing?

The starting point is simple. Rather than casting a wide net and waiting for the right prospects to raise their hands, you name the companies you want to win and focus your team’s time, budget and talent on them. The term was coined in 2003 by Bev Burgess at ITSMA, an American association of IT services marketers. Her definition fits on one line: treat each key account as a market in its own right.

That shift changes everything else. In conventional prospecting, the unit you count is the contact: you measure opens, clicks, leads. In ABM, the unit becomes the company, along with the five, ten or fifteen people who will have a say in the decision. A buyer who opens every one of your emails is worth very little if the finance director has never heard your name.

ITSMA broke the approach down into three tiers, which almost everything written on the subject has since adopted.

For a small or mid-sized business, that third tier is often the realistic way in. You don’t need a dedicated agency or a trade show budget. A well-built list and sequences that adapt to each account are enough to get started.

ABM or volume prospecting: when to choose which

ABM doesn’t bury volume prospecting. The two approaches answer different situations, and many sales teams would do well to run both side by side.

Volume prospecting works when deal sizes stay modest, a single person makes the call and the market is made up of thousands of similar companies. A well-written sequence sent to a targeted list will then book meetings at a reasonable cost. In that case, the techniques of B2B email prospecting remain the most direct method.

The equation flips with big deals. Few potential customers, contracts worth tens of thousands of euros, a sales cycle of six months or more, a committee that decides collectively. Losing one of those accounts to a generic message is expensive. Winning it back is even more so.

The last row is the one most often underestimated. LinkedIn’s B2B Institute studied more than 7,000 B2B companies in 2024: on average, the targets pursued by marketing and by sales overlapped by only 16%. In volume prospecting, the gap gets lost in the numbers. In ABM, it becomes untenable, because the account list either belongs to both teams or is useless.

Building your target account list

This is where everything is decided. Too broad, and the list spreads your effort thin and drags you back into volume prospecting in disguise. Too narrow, and the whole quarter rests on three deals.

Start from your best customers

The most reliable starting point isn’t a directory, it’s your own customer base. Which clients bring in the most revenue, stay the longest, recommend you? What they have in common sketches your ideal account profile: sector, headcount, region, how they organise purchasing, which tools they already use. The exercise nearly always surfaces one or two criteria nobody had ever written down, such as the size of the marketing team or the distribution model.

Combine potential with signals

The ideal profile gives the list its shape. Potential and activity signals decide the order. A company that is hiring a CRM manager, changing leadership or raising funds will be more willing to listen than a neighbour with an identical profile. Your own data counts too: an account where three employees have downloaded a white paper in six months shouldn’t be treated like a stranger.

Bear in mind, all the same, that most of these accounts aren’t buying right now. In a study published by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimates that around 5% of B2B buyers are in the market at any given moment. The other 95% will buy later. ABM is also about being the name that comes to mind on that day.

Map the buying group

A target company isn’t an email address. In its study “The State of Business Buying 2026”, based on nearly 18,000 buyers, Forrester counts an average of 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers around a B2B purchasing decision. Without going that far for every account, identify at the very least the decision-maker, the main user, the budget holder and the person who will sign off on the technical or compliance side. For each one, note what genuinely worries them. That is the raw material for your emails.

Personalising email sequences by account

Most ABM programmes lean on email first, well ahead of events or targeted advertising. That comes down to its flexibility: it can be personalised in fine detail, measured recipient by recipient and automated without losing its tone. You still have to use it differently from conventional prospecting.

Personalise by account, then by role

Personalisation works in two layers. The first is shared across the whole account: the company’s context, its news, the problem you believe you can solve. The second changes with the recipient. The finance director will read the same project in terms of cost and risk, the marketing manager in terms of results, the IT director in terms of integration and security.

In practice, you end up with one core message per account, adapted into three or four versions by role. The personalisation fields of your email platform carry the second layer. The first is written by hand for one-to-one accounts and by cluster for the rest. And a subject line that mentions the company’s real project beats every catchy formula in the world.

Coordinate several contacts in the same company

Writing to five people at the same company without coordination means running the risk that they compare notes by the coffee machine. Three rules keep you from looking like you’re blanketing the firm:

• stagger your first contacts over several days, starting with the person closest to the need;
• give each message content specific to the role, never the same text with only the first name swapped;
• stop or adjust the sequence for the whole account as soon as one contact replies, books a meeting or asks not to be contacted again.

That last point means the sequence has to reason at company level, not just contact level. A workflow built with Ediware’s marketing automation can carry that logic: a condition on the “company” field, a shared exit for every contact at the account, an alert sent to the salesperson.

What deliverability demands when you write to the same domain

Here is the angle that ABM guides leave out. An ABM programme sends little, but it concentrates its sends on a small number of recipient domains. And a company’s filters, whether it runs Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or a security gateway, watch sender behaviour precisely domain by domain. Ten near-identical messages landing the same morning with ten employees of the same company look like a mass campaign, or even a spear-phishing attempt.

A few precautions are enough. Space out your sends to any one domain and make the content genuinely different. Send from an authenticated domain, with a reputation that depends only on your own practices, which argues for a dedicated IP address rather than one shared with other senders. And keep a close eye on bounces: an address in a strategic account that has become invalid often signals that a contact has left. That is sales intelligence as much as a technical incident.

Staying within the framework set by the CNIL

ABM is still prospecting, and French law regulates it. The CNIL allows emails to be sent to professionals without prior consent, on one condition: the subject of the message must relate to the recipient’s profession. Its own example speaks for itself, a piece of software presented to a company’s IT director. The recipient must be informed and able to object simply and free of charge, when their data is collected and at any time afterwards. Article L34-5 of the French Postal and Electronic Communications Code also prohibits concealing the sender’s identity or misrepresenting the purpose of the message.

For ABM, the rule works rather well. A message personalised by role is, by design, related to the recipient’s job. It is firing the same email at an entire organisation chart, accounts department and reception included, that falls outside the rules.

Measuring the ROI of an ABM strategy

The usual email metrics don’t go away, they change scale. A 60% open rate on an account where only the executive assistant reads your messages tells you nothing useful. What matters is the coverage and engagement of the account as a whole.

The benchmark studies give an idea of the potential. In its benchmark published at the end of 2022 with the ABM Leadership Alliance, based on around 300 ABM leaders, ITSMA reports that 72% of respondents consider the ROI of ABM higher than that of their other marketing activities. Demandbase reached a similar finding in 2024: 81% of the best-performing B2B marketers get a better ROI from ABM. These figures come from committed players, some of whom sell ABM platforms, and they cover fairly mature programmes. A trend, then. Not a promise.

The real trap is timing. On a nine-month sales cycle, judging an ABM programme after six weeks is like digging up the plant to check its roots. Set interim milestones, coverage, then engagement, then meetings, and keep revenue for the annual review.

Tools and integrations for ABM

Specialist ABM platforms exist, with intent data, account-targeted advertising and dedicated dashboards. Their price effectively reserves them for large marketing teams. Yet an SME can run a perfectly respectable one-to-few or one-to-many ABM programme with building blocks it often already has.

The deciding factor is still how data flows. The CRM has to pass each contact’s parent account to the sending tool, and get opens, clicks and replies back in return. Without that sync, account engagement is little more than wishful thinking. An API and a few connectors to your business tools settle the matter.

That is the thinking behind Ediware’s B2B prospecting solution: prospecting, email, SMS and automation in a single dashboard, with dedicated IPs and data hosted in France. For a team starting out with ABM, it saves stacking up four subscriptions before the first message has even been written.

ABM doesn’t replace the rest of your B2B email marketing strategy. It becomes its spearhead: a few dozen accounts followed closely, while newsletters, nurturing and prospecting keep working the rest of the market. Start small, with twenty accounts, one cluster and a quarter ahead of you. And measure at account level from day one.