First of all let’s crack the acronyms for those of you who may not be familiar with ROI which is a financial term that stands for Return On Investment that is simply the results (often monetary and financial but could be also other intangible or indirect results) one receives in return for their own financial investment. It can be also pejoratively used to refer to other types of investments such as time and efforts people make generally in their lives.

ABM: Account Based Marketing is rather a contemporary marketing notion and principle used by marketers, sales leaders and key account managers who tend to focus their promotional and marketing activities primarily on key customers. The method allows to allocate the marketing budget and spending on a more personalized and effective manner on valuable clients to convey the right message on the right time to the right client.

Marketing executives cannot disagree about the fact that an existing customer is more valuable and that it is substantially cheaper to market to existing clients (returning and repeat buyers) than to acquire new ones.
By focusing your marketing efforts on existing accounts using different metrics, existing insights and data and past client experiences, you are optimizing your costs and leveraging the returns on you marketing investment, therefore multiplying your chances for getting more from what is being invested on.

While ABM (Account Based Marketing) may initially sound more fit for a B-to-B context and that it would work best with existing accounts only, it is as a matter of fact a method designed to perfectly be employed across the B-to-C spectrum and for acquiring new clients as well. In the case of marketing to the mass and account acquisition, defining your buyer persona, mapping, profiling and marketing automation techniques are used, and this is called Programmatic ABM.
ABM’s goal is to relevantly build good reputation to generate new opportunities and strengthen relationships to maximize profits from high-yield customers.