Retail Retold: A new chapter for ABM

Best ABM Campaign Winner, UK Agency Awards 2024

How do you scale a sales pipeline fast in a fiercely competitive retail space? By harnessing personalised ABM to show retail leaders the unique opportunities within their business.

Getting personal at scale

Virgin Media O2 Business wanted to expand its sales pipeline among the largest leading UK retailers. But, with vendors selling the same old connectivity story, how could the newly merged business cut through to increase its pipeline coverage fast? In an industry where the customer is always right, Virgin Media O2 needed to show it better understood the unique challenges faced by retail leaders at individual accounts. So, we designed the business’s first One-to-Few Accounts Based Marketing (ABM) programme to target decision makers at 56 large retailers. Building on an established 1-to-1 (sector-wide) ABM programme, we used account-level insights to go deeper and create highly personalised content at scale.

Rewriting the retail story

At the heart of our ABM programme was a big idea designed to provoke reconsideration and to flex and scale. Enter "Retail Retold": an invitation to business leaders to rewrite their own retail story by harnessing the power of connectivity to deliver more of what their customers want. The campaign was built around custom content matching the unique operational challenges of each account – and aligned with three identified solution areas (customer experiences, convenience and operational efficiency). Retail Retold included creative assets ranging from tactical ads and tailored emails through to custom-use case reports. In just three months, we created 159 personalised content experiences – each with a uniquely relevant retail story to tell.

Driving Sales without the big sell

Retail Retold was rolled out through a mix of content syndication, paid media, webinars and email execution that directed target accounts to custom landing pages where the highest engagements led to Sales enablement. The result? Revenue to date of £2.3 million, 15:1 ROI within six months, 58 key decision makers engaged, 1.6k page views from target decision makers, 2.1k contacts mapped across 56 accounts, and 85 qualified account leads for sales follow-up. Deeper personalisation, deeper analytics, deeper relationships – ultimately leading to a win for the Best ABM Campaign at the UK Agency Awards 2024.