If you are a business wondering how to grow your B2B email list, you are probably not the only one. With a huge competition from other businesses, blogs, advertisements, the number of newsletters your customers and prospects are receiving is skyrocketing. Furthermore, being in the B2B place does not make things easier: the average B2B email open rate is 4.6% lower than the one for B2C (15.1% for B2B vs. 19.7% for B2C). B2B readers simply do not have the time. Chances are, they are getting hundreds of emails passing through each day.
However, this does not mean that email marketing is a lost cause. It is still a very important communications tool and it should definitely take a central place in your overall marketing strategy.
Go Back To The Beginnings
The easiest, safest, and most effective methods to collect more email subscribers is to grow your list organically. Never attempt to buy lists as you risk to end up with a dubious quality list and potentially damage your brand image. Rather, try to drive quality prospects to your site who then opt-in to receive communications from you.
As a business, you should already have a lot of contacts spread across your organization: in your CRM system, Excel files, order history, customer support communications, etc.
You have to think about all of the points of contact with your customers and prospects and extract all these emails to combine them into a dedicated B2B email list. Since you have already had previous interactions with them, the likelihood of them clicking on your email and reacting to the Call-To-Action (CTA) in it is significantly higher.
Now that you have set the basics, you are ready to go ahead and find more creative ways to grow your subscribers base.
So What Are Our Top 8 Ways to Grow Your B2B Email Marketing List?
1. Use Website Pop-Ups or Lead Magnets
Collecting emails from visitors to your website is a fantastic way to grow your lists: they are already browsing through your website content, which means that they know about your product or service and you have caught their attention. This makes them great potential future leads, so you should not miss your chance to grab them.
You can either use pop-ups a few seconds after they go onto your website, or when they attempt to exit it. In this pop-up, you can ask them to leave their email address to subscribe to your newsletter, get a discount code on their next purchase, offer them freebies, etc.
For example, you can offer content for free, relevant to the service you are providing:
Pop-up on HeidiCohen, while browsing on the website
2. Offer Fun ‘Games’ or Quizzes
This is another form of a lead magnet, whereby a game or a quiz pop-up shows up. It is a fun way to entice people to share their email addresses with you. For example, if your business is about delivering corporate training courses, you could offer a free quiz, that goes as follows: “Take this quiz to find out what is the best training course to offer your employees?”. There are many tools out there that can help you create quiz/game lead magnets, so definitely consider giving this method a try.
Quiz pop-up example from Interact
3. Offer A Freebie (Ebook, Case Study, Report)
A very easy but effective way to grow your marketing list is to offer something for free, ideally related to the product or service you are offering, and ask for them to fill-in their email address in order to receive it. For example, if you are selling an email marketing software, you can create an e-book on how to build a successful email marketing strategy. But it does not have to be limited to an e-book. You can offer free tutorials, demos, webinars, templates,.. the list goes on. This is a great way to collect new leads that are potentially interested in your company or industry.
Free e-book on how to start your online business from therisingceo
4. Run A Webinar
A webinar, as mentioned above, is just one of the different types of freebies you can offer for free, in return for an email address. The reason we have decided to focus on this one as a separate method is that webinars are a great way to demonstrate thought leadership on a given topic, show credibility, and provide useful information for free, thus generating a sense of trust. Furthermore, when you offer a free webinar with a lot of useful information, attendees will be even more curious to know what additional valuable information you will be able to provide once they pay for your product or service.
There are two ways to execute this:
- Run a live webinar: in this case, you need to promote it well in advance, to ensure that enough people sign up prior to the date of the webinar. Even if you do not get the number you hoped for, this should not discourage you, as you should always record your webinars and promote them afterward on your website, on social media, etc.
- Offer a pre-recorded webinar: if you chose to go for a pre-recorded webinar, you should not worry about driving attendance prior to a given date. You can simply leave a link to your webinar on your website (or alternatively, promote it via other channels), and ask for people to share their email address in order to get access to it.
Example of how Neil Patel is promoting webinars on his website
5. Create A Newsletter Sign-up Field
This is a basic, but such an easy way to get emails. Even if this will probably not be the method that will bring you the most leads, it is so easy that we simply do not see a reason for you to not do it. If you are a fast-growing business offering a great new service, or if you are simply publishing great content, chances are people will like to stay up to date with your communication.
Simply add a field on your website where people can register to receive your free newsletter. Ideally, keep it visible on all pages of your website, for example in the footer or the header.
A website field to sign up for a free newsletter on boagworks
6. Have A Website ChatBot
Let’s take a second to distinguish between a live chat and a chatbot:
- In a live chat, you are chatting with a real service agent on the other end. This is a great alternative to calling a service center
- A chatbot is an automated chat, which uses artificial intelligence software to simulate a real person conversation. Basically, the interaction is carried by a machine, which takes customer questions and responds quickly even to relatively complex queries
Both of them are a great way to get visitors’ attention and can be a real game-changer in the sales process. If you do not have the capacity to run a live chat because you do not have the service agent capacity for example, then a chatbot is a great way to collect new emails automatically and send them straight to your email marketing platform instantly.
Chat pop-up on Salesforce
Chatbot offering a freebie on tidio.com
7. Contact Us Forms
If you have a ‘Contact Us’ form on your website, do make sure that you add the email addresses of people who have reached out to your B2B list. This is a basic step but often times overlooked. Do the same if you do not have a contact form but use an email address. Open your inbox and collect all relevant emails.
Example of a contact us form on Stripe
8. Subscribe/Sign-up Button
Another easy trick is to add a subscribe or a sign-up button at the bottom of an article, blog post, or other piece of content. If they have read the entire content, chances are you have managed to catch their attention and this is a great moment to ask them to subscribe to your newsletter/email list.
Example of a sign-up button on Moz
Conclusion
There are many ways to grow your business’ b2b email marketing list. The 6 methods outlined above are just some ways you could explore. Be creative, explore different options, and run A/B testing to see which method has the highest impact on your business. Remember, never buy email lists but rather, but allow your lists to grow organically over time, to ensure you have the most up-to-date lists with hot leads.