How to Build an Email List for B2B Marketing

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Email Marketing is one of the oldest and the most impactful channel for generating leads for B2B marketing. Integrating email marketing with modern practices such as; automated email campaigns, artificial intelligence, personalized content & optimized website design for the audiences, can help in bolstering the revenue of B2B businesses. A recent report published by eConsultancy rates Email Marketing as the number 1 channel for driving Return on Investment (ROI) for the B2B marketers.
According to a report by HubSpot, the Email Marketing Database degrades by about 22.5% every year due to attribution.
Therefore, it’s extremely important for B2B marketers to keep on adding new contacts to their email marketing database. An email list is comprised of a collection of email addresses that businesses create by running lead-generating campaigns & engaging with potential buyers at different stages of their individual buying cycles. The list can shrink when subscribers opt-out of email subscriptions, switch their email addresses or change their jobs. The acquisition of new potential customers through the lead generating campaigns leads to growth in the email list.

Why Building A Healthy & Persistent Email List Is Vital

The following key takeaways, from an analysis report by Ogilvy, imply that building a healthy email list is imperative to the success of B2B marketers.
  1. The organic reach of email marketing is about 30% while popular social media channel Facebook generates only 6% of the organic traffic.
  2. With more than 4 billion email accounts worldwide, email has about 3 times greater reach than Facebook & about 15 times greater reach than another popular social media channel Twitter.
  3. The average email open rates across the globe is about 30% & thus the likelihood of a business message being viewed by emails is about 5 times more than when the message is advertised through Facebook.

Steps To Building An Email List:

1. Offering Incentives: The website visitors are more likely to subscribe to schemes about a product or service once they are offered some lucrative incentives, to begin with. The marketers can offer some product discounts or discount on combined purchase of two similar products & can provide some special offers or discounts to their potential buyers. 2. Simple Subscription Opportunities: The website audience is more likely to subscribe if the content on the landing page is captivating, simple & conveys an impactful message in a few words. Also, marketers need to make sure that subscriptions through the other channels such as blogs & e-books aren’t too complicated. The marketers with a complex subscription process will receive fewer subscribers in spite of offering lucrative offers. 3. Building A Large Email List: Having a large email list is always good for businesses. The more the subscribers, the higher are the chances of optimizing the conversion rates. 4. Creating Personalized & Quality Content:   The content needs to be amazing & needs to reflect your brand proposition as well. It needs to answer the vital questions being asked by the potential buyers. Crafting a content strategy around addressing the pain points of the customers & delivering to them hyper-personalized content, targeted to resolve their issues, lies at the center of B2B marketing. Not only this, but content curators should also keep in mind that every audience likes to consume content through different channels in different forms.

Following tips may prove to be beneficial:

a. Research & Write: When it comes to writing a blog, researching & writing is advised. It is advised that the key takeaways should be listed in a spreadsheet before it can be published in the form of a blog. Some people also advise writing by breaking it up, i.e. writing on a single topic by fragmenting it into multiple portions over the duration of two to three days rather than completing the entire topic on a single day. b. Telling a story: A common adage states that if history could have been written in the form of stories, nobody would have forgotten them. Story-telling is new & one of the hottest trends in the B2B dominion.  It is also arguably one of the most preferred ways of content consumption.
According to KISSmetrics, telling a story through content can increase the readership by 300%.
c. Facilitate Visual Learning: According to a study published by studymode.com, 65% people are visual learners & hence the content strategists should consider conveying their messages in a visual manner. This can be done by using quality pictures that resonate with the ideas being publicized by the blogs and by the use of infographics. d. Use Videos in Content Strategy: According to a study by Wyzowl, 87% of businesses now use videos as marketing tools. The figure has shown a steep increase over the past years when the percentages were 81% & 63% respectively, for 2018 & 2017. As the competition in the marketplace has grown fiercer than ever, both the marketers & the audiences are looking for ways to avoid noise. A well-planned video strategy ensures that not only the marketers are able to convey their messages in an impactful manner but the potential buyers are also able to assimilate the information meticulously. The study by Wyzowl also shows that 96% people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service. 5. Promoting Online Contests: A recent study by Unbounce shows that landing pages with a contest generated 700% more email subscribers than those without a contest option. Offering users a free giveaway & then encouraging them to click-through to your website & sign up using their email address, is a practice that often works. 6. Using Social Bars: Sharing other people’s content via social media accounts drives traffic to outside websites. Using a social bar allows marketers to curate content while still building their email list. A social bar lies at the top of the content that is being shared through the social media channels & promotes signing up to email lists. Using a simple call to action buttons as “Subscribe to get the similar articles delivered to your inbox” can captivate the attention of the readers & can entice them to sign up. Tools such as Sniply can be used. 7. Landing Page Subscriptions: Leveraging content management systems like WordPress for websites allows for the creation of new pages plus adding some new text inviting people to subscribe & adding a subscription form.  Alternatively, employing landing page builder tools to create a landing page & to add the subscription form can also help. 8. Promoting Lead Generation Offers On Facebook & Twitter: Creating Facebook & Twitter campaigns to promote an e-book or a free resource to followers & encouraging them to sign up using their email address works in building email lists. Adding social sharing buttons to landing & thank-you pages facilitates the users to share the content displayed on the pages, within their network. 9. A/B Testing different campaigns: Similar and alternative form of lead generating campaigns can be tested over a period of time amongst the users so as to find out which one performs better. Testing alternative forms of design on landing pages, different text on the call-to-action buttons & changing the color & font on the website can be split-tested. A/B testing can be open or close-ended depending on the business requirements. 10. Hosting Online Webinars: Webinars are a perfect way to indulge in an interactive discussion with existing & potential buyers as well as with experts in the industry. They provide a platform to derive meaningful insights by live-brainstorming. According to a report produced in Search Engine Journal, 91% of B2B marketers agree that webinars are a preferred type of content. Furthermore, webinars are signed up by email addresses & they provide opportunities to contact the participants afterward. The valuable insights from webinars can also be in the form of blogs, news articles, industry’s hottest trends, etc. 11. Other Methods: Various other methods such as using slider instead of invasive pop-up boxes, using featured box below the header of the blogs for generating conversions, using scrolling header bar at the top of the website screen, including customer reviews on the website & landing pages & guest blogging on third-party websites can help in building & growing email lists.

Conclusion:

In an era of ferocious competition, the marketers need to constantly add new contacts to their email marketing campaigns & test run them. This will ensure that the total number of potential customers (comprising website traffic) is always high. In order to build a perennial & healthy sales pipeline, building & growing your email list is crucial. We at, Valasys Media, are experts at running lead generating & nurturing email marketing campaigns which ensure that our clients have a healthy sales pipeline & their sales conversions are at an optimum. For more information about our services, feel free to contact us.

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