4 Steps to Build Your B2B Email List

If you follow our posts, you already know the benefits that email marketing campaigns bring to your business. Especially about ROI, this is because, for every $1 invested in campaigns, the company can expect an average return of $42.
Unlike the B2C business model - where decision-making depends generally only on one consumer - B2B requires more steps, as the decision process involves more departments, research, and experiments.

Creating timely and personalized campaigns is very important in this process, but your efforts can backfire if you don’t have a strong contact list. Luckily, today we’ll talk about the 5 steps to build your B2B email list.

How to build your B2B email list

1. No shortcuts! Be authentic

Just a quick search and you’ll find various companies selling contact lists that promise you to be the best list in the world. But make no mistake! You will see a decrease in your inbox placement and sender reputation when you send emails that are not opt-in - meaning, those that did not sign up to receive emails from you - Although growing your B2B email list and sending to more contacts can be enticing, it can actually harm your sender’s reputation if the recipients are not engaging with your emails, or even marking them as “spam”. And once that happens, it increases the chances of your email getting marked by spam filters and ending up in the spam folder automatically. So, if you care for your domain reputation, you want to be compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which means sending emails only to recipients that explicitly agree to receive emails from your company.

2. Make them sign up for your website

Despite being a basic idea, many businesses still do not use this strategy to build their B2B email list. If you produce relevant content or offer an interesting product, your audience will naturally want to be on top of all the news you have to offer. The most practical way to do this is to provide the option for them to subscribe to your newsletter. If you want to go even further, you can integrate a widget to validate in real-time the emails that are submitted in your form. This way, you prevent invalid emails from entering your list, harming your deliverability in general. You can utilize this option in an interactive quiz, at the footer, or even in your live chat. And remember to keep it as simple as possible, you don’t want to add too many steps for them to subscribe.

3. Put yourself out there

Having a more reactive approach might not be the best idea if you’re looking to build and grow your B2B email list. You can use strategies for lead generation by creating helpful content your target audience is actively looking for. This is what Inbound Marketing is made of. This strategy includes webinars, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Search engine optimization (SEO), and others. Creating experiences tailored to your channels of choice is essential to the success of your B2B list. Once you attract your audience, then you can apply the previous tip to get their signing up for your newsletter.

4. Make your partners advocate for you

How did you find out about the next thing you should watch? A lot of us learned about that show that we fell in love with from friends and family. And it’s not so different when we’re talking about a B2B email list, that’s because 50-91% of B2B purchases are influenced by word of mouth. It’s all about what they talk about when you’re not in the room.

Let’s take a look at a real example of Word of Mouth brought by Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin in the book Talk Triggers. According to the author, there are 4 requirements involved in creating opportunities for your customers to talk about your business. They’re: repeatable, reasonable, relevant, and remarkable. One of the case studies they presented in the book is the Hilton Doubletree hotel which gives a warm chocolate chip cookie to every single guest when they check in. Doing a quick math, you have 75,000 being given out each day. If 34% of guests tell their friends. That’s 25,000 stories being told about Doubletree, every single day.

This works not only for B2C cases but also for enterprise companies and also for small businesses. If you can’t think of one element that would do that, having a customer word can help you identify potential talk triggers. Another practical example would be creating awesome events that help connect your customers with the community, this will generate not only social collaboration but as they successfully reach a broader audience, they’ll relate that to your company and potentially become volunteer marketers. Which will bring more new contacts to your list!

Or course, not everything you implement will generate talk triggers, but it’s important that you keep trying and testing. Purposeful Word of mouth is the most powerful and cost-effective method of customer acquisition and growth.

5. Build a strong list!

Now that you have followed the steps to start building your B2B email list, you want to have something more important than quantity, and that is quality! Sending campaigns to invalid emails will not only jeopardize your marketing goal but will lower your reputation as a sender. As we mentioned in the first tip, this will decrease your deliverability. You can use an email verifier to get rid of bad emails and bounces. And therefore, increase your campaign’s ROI and keep your B2B email list always up-to-date!